(Quick Reference)

The Grails Framework

Authors: The Grails Team

Version: 

Table of Contents

1 Introduction

Many modern web frameworks in the Java space are more complicated than needed and don’t embrace the Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) principles.

Dynamic frameworks like Rails and Django helped pave the way to a more modern way of thinking about web applications. Grails builds on these concepts and dramatically reduces the complexity of building web applications on the Java platform. What makes it different, however, is that it does so by building on already established Java technologies like Spring and Hibernate.

Grails is a full stack framework and attempts to solve as many pieces of the web development puzzle through the core technology and its associated plugins. Included out the box are things like:

All of these are made easy to use through the power of the Groovy language and the extensive use of Domain Specific Languages (DSLs)

This documentation will take you through getting started with Grails and building web applications with the Grails framework.

In addition to this documentation there are comprehensive guides that walk you through various aspects of the technology.

Finally, Grails is far more than just a web framework and is made up of various sub-projects. The following table summarizes some other key projects in the eco-system with links to documentation.

Table 1. Grails Ecosystem Projects
Project Description

GORM for Hibernate

An Object Mapping implementation for SQL databases

GORM for MongoDB

An Object Mapping implementation for the MongoDB Document Database

GORM for Neo4j

An Object Mapping implementation for Neo4j Graph Database

JSON Views

A View technology for rendering JSON on the server side

Groovy Server Pages

A View technology for rendering HTML and other markup on the server

Async Framework

Asynchronous programming abstraction with support for RxJava, GPars and more

1.1 What's new in Grails 5?

This section covers all the new features introduced in Grails 5

Overview

This release includes support for Apache Groovy 3, Micronaut framework 3, Gradle 7, Spring Boot 2.6, Spring framework 5.3, and Spock 2.0.

Apache Groovy 3 is a major highlight of this release. It comes with a brand new Parrot parser and a bunch of new features and capabilities. The Parrot parser supports additional syntax and language features, such as lambda expressions, default methods with interfaces, and a lot more. In addition, several new extension methods are added to existing Java classes. See the release notes for Groovy 3.0 for details.

Grails framework 5 updates to Spring 5.3.10 and Spring Boot 2.5.5. We strongly recommend checking the following Spring technologies release notes for more information.

Grails framework 5 is built with Groovy 3.0.7, which requires JDK 8 as the minimum version of JRE. We have tested most Grails projects up to JDK 14.

Important Changes

Deprecating ‘dot’-Based Navigation

The ‘dot’-based navigation to Grails config is deprecated and will be removed in the future.

We request that you update your plugins to use configuration beans @ConfigurationProperties or @Value, or access configuration settings using grailsApplication.config.getProperty(‘a.b.c’, String) instead of grailsApplication.config.a.b.c. For more information, read the documentation at Creating and Installing Plugins.

Default Autowire By Type

In previous versions, the beans inside the Grails DataService were autowire by name, but this is changed to autowire by type in Grails framework 5. Use the Spring @Qualifier annotation to autowire by name. For details, see the Spring documentation for Fine-tuning Annotation Based Autowiring with Qualifiers.

Grails Gradle Plugin

The Grails Gradle Plugin is moved out of grails-core and may follow separate versioning, so you should decouple the grailsVersion Gradle property from grailsGradlePluginVersion in existing applications.

Grails Gradle Publish Plugin Removed

The Grails Gradle Publish plugin used the Bintray API to publish artifacts. However, after the JFrog shutdown of Bintray, this stopped working. We have removed this plugin from the new Grails Plugin applications.

1.1.1 Updated Dependencies

Grails 5.2.4 ships with the following dependency upgrades:

  • Groovy 3.0.7

  • Micronaut 3

  • Micronaut for Spring 4

  • GORM 7.2.0

  • Spring Framework 5.3

  • Spring Boot 2.6

  • Gradle 7.2

  • Spock 2.0-groovy-3.0

  • Grails Testing Support 2.3.0

2 Getting Started

2.1 Installation Requirements

Before installing Grails 5.2.4 you will need as a minimum a Java Development Kit (JDK) installed version 1.8 or above. Download the appropriate JDK for your operating system, run the installer, and then set up an environment variable called JAVA_HOME pointing to the location of this installation.

To automate the installation of Grails we recommend SDKMAN which greatly simplifies installing and managing multiple Grails versions.

On some platforms (for example macOS) the Java installation is automatically detected. However in many cases you will want to manually configure the location of Java. For example, if you’re using bash or another variant of the Bourne Shell:

export JAVA_HOME=/Library/Java/Home
export PATH="$PATH:$JAVA_HOME/bin"
On Windows you would have to configure these environment variables in My Computer/Advanced/Environment Variables

2.2 Downloading and Installing

The first step to getting up and running with Grails is to install the distribution.

The best way to install Grails on *nix systems is with SDKMAN which greatly simplifies installing and managing multiple Grails versions.

Install with SDKMAN

To install the latest version of Grails using SDKMAN, run this on your terminal:

sdk install grails

You can also specify a version

sdk install grails 5.2.4

You can find more information about SDKMAN usage on the SDKMAN Docs

Manual installation

For manual installation follow these steps:

  • Download a binary distribution of Grails and extract the resulting zip file to a location of your choice

  • Set the GRAILS_HOME environment variable to the location where you extracted the zip

Unix/Linux

  • This is typically a matter of adding something like the following export GRAILS_HOME=/path/to/grails to your profile

  • This can be done by adding export PATH="$PATH:$GRAILS_HOME/bin" to your profile

Windows

  • Copy the path to the bin directory inside the grails folder you have downloaded, for example,

C:/path_to_grails/bin
  • Go to Environment Variables, you can typically search or run the command below, the type env and then Enter

Start + R
  • Edit the Path variable on User Variables / System Variables depending on your choice.

  • Paste the copied path in the Path Variable.

If Grails is working correctly you should now be able to type grails -version in the terminal window and see output similar to this:

Grails version: 5.2.4

2.3 Creating an Application

To create a Grails application you first need to familiarize yourself with the usage of the grails command which is used in the following manner:

grails <<command name>>

Run create-app to create an application:

grails create-app helloworld

This will create a new directory inside the current one that contains the project. Navigate to this directory in your console:

cd helloworld

2.4 A Hello World Example

Let’s now take the new project and turn it into the classic "Hello world!" example. First, change into the "helloworld" directory you just created and start the Grails interactive console:

$ cd helloworld
$ grails

You should see a prompt that looks like this:

interactive helloworld

What we want is a simple page that just prints the message "Hello World!" to the browser. In Grails, whenever you want a new page you just create a new controller action for it. Since we don’t yet have a controller, let’s create one now with the create-controller command:

grails> create-controller hello

Don’t forget that in the interactive console, we have auto-completion on command names. So you can type "cre" and then press <tab> to get a list of all create-* commands. Type a few more letters of the command name and then <tab> again to finish.

The above command will create a new controller in the grails-app/controllers/helloworld directory called HelloController.groovy. Why the extra helloworld directory? Because in Java land, it’s strongly recommended that all classes are placed into packages, so Grails defaults to the application name if you don’t provide one. The reference page for create-controller provides more detail on this.

We now have a controller so let’s add an action to generate the "Hello World!" page. In any text editor, edit the new controller — the HelloController.groovy file — by adding a render line. The edited file’s code should look like this:

package helloworld

class HelloController {

    def index() {
        render "Hello World!"
    }
}

The action is simply a method. In this particular case, it calls a special method provided by Grails to render the page.

Job done. To see your application in action, you just need to start up a server with another command called run-app:

grails> run-app

This will start an embedded server on port 8080 that hosts your application. You should now be able to access your application at the URL http://localhost:8080/ - try it!

To set a context path for your application, you can add a configuration property in grails-app/conf/application.yml:

server:
    servlet:
        context-path: /helloworld

With the above configuration in place the server will instead startup at the URL http://localhost:8080/helloworld/.

Alternatively, you can also set the context path via the command line:

grails> run-app -Dgrails.server.servlet.context-path=/helloworld
If you see the error "Server failed to start for port 8080: Address already in use", then it means another server is running on that port. You can easily work around this by running your server on a different port using run-app -port=9090. '9090' is just an example: you can pretty much choose anything within the range 1024 to 49151.
On Windows, if you see the error "> A problem occurred starting process 'command 'C:\path\to\java.exe''", run it again with the --stacktrace flag. If the root error is "Caused by: java.io.IOException: CreateProcess error=206, The filename or extension is too long", add grails { pathingJar = true } to your build.gradle file. This is a known limitation with Windows.

The result will look something like this:

intropage

This is the Grails intro page which is rendered by the grails-app/view/index.gsp file. It detects the presence of your controllers and provides links to them. You can click on the "HelloController" link to see our custom page containing the text "Hello World!". Voila! You have your first working Grails application.

One final thing: a controller can contain many actions, each of which corresponds to a different page (ignoring AJAX at this point). Each page is accessible via a unique URL that is composed from the controller name and the action name: /<appname>/<controller>/<action>. This means you can access the Hello World page via /helloworld/hello/index, where 'hello' is the controller name (remove the 'Controller' suffix from the class name and lower-case the first letter) and 'index' is the action name. But you can also access the page via the same URL without the action name: this is because 'index' is the default action. See the end of the controllers and actions section of the user guide to find out more on default actions.

2.5 Using Interactive Mode

Since 3.0, Grails has an interactive mode which makes command execution faster since the JVM doesn’t have to be restarted for each command. To use interactive mode simple type 'grails' from the root of any projects and use TAB completion to get a list of available commands. See the screenshot below for an example:

interactive output

For more information on the capabilities of interactive mode refer to the section on Interactive Mode in the user guide.

2.6 Getting Set Up in an IDE

IntelliJ IDEA

IntelliJ IDEA is an excellent IDE for Grails 5.0 development. It comes in 2 editions, the free community edition and the paid-for ultimate edition.

The community edition can be used for most things, although GSP syntax higlighting is only part of the ultimate edition

You can always open GSP files in the HTML editor if you just want highlighting in the community edition.

To get started with Intellij IDEA and Grails 5.0 simply go to File / Open and point IDEA at your build.gradle file to import and configure the project.

TextMate, Sublime, VIM etc.

There are several excellent text editors that work nicely with Groovy and Grails. See below for references:

2.7 Convention over Configuration

Grails uses "convention over configuration" to configure itself. This typically means that the name and location of files is used instead of explicit configuration, hence you need to familiarize yourself with the directory structure provided by Grails.

Here is a breakdown and links to the relevant sections:

2.8 Running and Debugging an Application

Grails applications can be run with the built in Tomcat server using the run-app command which will load a server on port 8080 by default:

grails run-app

You can specify a different port by using the -port argument:

grails run-app -port=8090

Note that it is better to start up the application in interactive mode since a container restart is much quicker:

$ grails
grails> run-app
| Grails application running at http://localhost:8080 in environment: development
grails> stop-app
| Shutting down application...
| Application shutdown.
grails> run-app
| Grails application running at http://localhost:8080 in environment: development

You can debug a grails app by simply right-clicking on the Application.groovy class in your IDE and choosing the appropriate action (since Grails 3).

Alternatively, you can run your app with the following command and then attach a remote debugger to it.

grails run-app --debug-jvm

More information on the run-app command can be found in the reference guide.

2.9 Testing an Application

The create-* commands in Grails automatically create unit or integration tests for you within the src/test/groovy directory. It is of course up to you to populate these tests with valid test logic, information on which can be found in the section on Unit and integration tests.

To execute tests you run the test-app command as follows:

grails test-app

2.10 Deploying an Application

Grails applications can be deployed in a number of different ways.

If you are deploying to a traditional container (Tomcat, Jetty etc.) you can create a Web Application Archive (WAR file), and Grails includes the war command for performing this task:

grails war

This will produce a WAR file under the build/libs directory which can then be deployed as per your container’s instructions.

Note that by default Grails will include an embeddable version of Tomcat inside the WAR file, this can cause problems if you deploy to a different version of Tomcat. If you don’t intend to use the embedded container then you should change the scope of the Tomcat dependencies to testImplementation (or provided if using Grails 4.x) prior to deploying to your production container in build.gradle:

testImplementation "org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-tomcat"

If you are building a WAR file to deploy on Tomcat 7 then in addition you will need to change the target Tomcat version in the build. Grails is built against Tomcat 8 APIs by default. To target a Tomcat 7 container, insert a line to build.gradle above the dependencies { } section:

ext['tomcat.version'] = '7.0.59'
Grails 5 contains dependencies that require javax.el-api:3.0 (eg.: datastore-gorm:7.x, spring-boot:2.x) which is only supported starting from Tomcat 8.x+, based on the tomcat version table!

Unlike most scripts which default to the development environment unless overridden, the war command runs in the production environment by default. You can override this like any script by specifying the environment name, for example:

grails dev war

If you prefer not to operate a separate Servlet container then you can simply run the Grails WAR file as a regular Java application. Example:

grails war
java -Dgrails.env=prod -jar build/libs/mywar-0.1.war

When deploying Grails you should always run your containers JVM with the -server option and with sufficient memory allocation. A good set of VM flags would be:

-server -Xmx768M

2.11 Supported Java EE Containers

Grails runs on any container that supports Servlet 3.0 and above and is known to work on the following specific container products:

  • Tomcat 7

  • GlassFish 3 or above

  • Resin 4 or above

  • JBoss 6 or above

  • Jetty 8 or above

  • Oracle Weblogic 12c or above

  • IBM WebSphere 8.0 or above

It’s required to set "-Xverify:none" in "Application servers > server > Process Definition > Java Virtual Machine > Generic JVM arguments" for older versions of WebSphere. This is no longer needed for WebSphere version 8 or newer.

Some containers have bugs however, which in most cases can be worked around. A list of known deployment issues can be found on the Grails wiki.

In addition, reference the Grails Guides for tips on how to deploy Grails to various popular Cloud services.

2.12 Creating Artefacts

Grails ships with a few convenience targets such as create-controller, create-domain-class and so on that will create controllers and different artefact types for you. NOTE: These are just for your convenience and you can just as easily use an IDE or your favourite text editor. For example to create the basis of an application you typically need a domain model:

grails create-app helloworld
cd helloworld
grails create-domain-class book

This will result in the creation of a domain class at grails-app/domain/helloworld/Book.groovy such as:

package helloworld

class Book {
}

There are many such create-* commands that can be explored in the command line reference guide.

To decrease the amount of time it takes to run Grails scripts, use the interactive mode.

2.13 Generating an Application

To get started quickly with Grails it is often useful to use a feature called scaffolding to generate the skeleton of an application. To do this use one of the generate-* commands such as generate-all, which will generate a controller (and its unit test) and the associated views:

grails generate-all helloworld.Book

3 Upgrading from the previous versions

3.1 Upgrading from Grails 4 to Grails 5

Bump up Grails Version

You will need to upgrade your Grails version defined in gradle.properties as:

gradle.properties
...
grailsVersion=5.1.1
...

Apache Groovy 3.0.7

Grails 5.1.1 provide support for Groovy 3. We would recommend you to please check the Release notes for Groovy 3 to update your application in case you are using a specific feature which might not work in Groovy 3.

Define groovyVersion in gradle.properties to force the application to use Groovy 3.

Grails 5.1 app’s gradle.properties

gradle.properties
...
groovyVersion=3.0.7
...

Bump up GORM Version

If you were using GORM, you will need to update the version defined in gradle.properties as:

gradle.properties
...
gormVersion=7.2.0
...

GORM for MonogDB Sync Driver

The GORM for MongoDB is updated to support latest mongodb-driver-sync. If you are using GORM for MongoDB and doing something specific to MongoDB Driver or low level Mongo API then you might want to take a look at Upgrading to the 4.0 Driver

Bump up Asset Pipeline plugin version

The previous version of asset-pipeline is not supported with Grails 5.0 as it is compiled with a version of Groovy which is binary incompatible with Groovy 3. So, please update the plugin version to 3.2.4.

Disabled StringCharArrayAccessor by default

The previous version of Grails use the StringCharArrayAccessor which is enabled by default and provides optimized access to java.lang.String internals. In Grails 5.0 it is disabled by default but you can enable it by setting a system property with name stringchararrayaccessor.disabled and value false.

Enabling StringCharArrayAccessor would show IllegalReflectiveAccess warnings as it uses reflection to do the optimizations.

Changes in profile.yml and feature.yml files in Grails Profiles

The format of how dependencies are defined in features and profiles has been changed. See the section on Application Profiles for more information.

Deprecation of dot navigation of Grails configuration

In order to reduce complexity, improve performance, and increase maintainability, accessing configuration through dot notation (config.a.b.c) has been deprecated. This functionality will be removed in a future release.

Also, you would see a warning message if you are accessing configuration through the dot notation.

The recommended way to access configuration is:

grailsApplication.config.getProperty("hola", String.class)

Spring 5.3

Grails 5.0.0.RC1 is built on Spring 5.3.2 See the Upgrading to Spring 5.3 if you are using Spring specific features.

Spring Boot 2.4

Grails 5.1.1 updates to Spring Boot 2.6. Please check Spring Boot 2.6 Release Notes for more information.

Micronaut 3.2.0

Grails 5.1.1 is shipped with Micronaut 3.2.0. Please check the Upgrading to Micronaut 3.x if you are using a specific feature.

Micronaut for Spring 4.0.1

Grails 5.1.1 is updated to Micronaut for Spring 4.0.1, please check out release notes for more information.

Gradle 7.x

Compile dependency configuration as well as others have been removed from Gradle 7.x. In previous version they were deprecated.

Replace configurations:

build.gradle
...
 compile -> implementation
 testCompile -> testImplementation
 runtime -> runtimeOnly
...
More information in Gradle upgrade docs Gradle upgrade docs

Plugins in multi-project setup

If you have grails plugins as part of multi-project builds you should also replace the compile with implementation configuration.

Additionally if your main application relied on the dependencies declared by the plugin you need to apply further changes.

To make the dependencies available again you have to declare them with api configuration. You also have to apply the java-library gradle plugin in your plugin project.

More information gradle java-library-plugin

3.2 Upgrading from Grails 3.3.x to Grails 4

Bump up Grails Version

You will need to upgrade your Grails version defined in gradle.properties.

Grails 3 app’s gradle.properties

gradle.properties
...
grailsVersion=3.3.8
...

Grails 4 app’s gradle.properties

gradle.properties
...
grailsVersion=4.0.4
...

Bump up GORM Version

If you were using GORM, you will need to update the version defined in gradle.properties.

Grails 3 app’s gradle.properties

gradle.properties
...
gormVersion=6.1.10.RELEASE
...

Grails 4 app’s gradle.properties

gradle.properties
...
gormVersion=7.0.4
...

Move GORM DSL Entries to runtime.groovy

GORM DSL entries should be move to runtime.groovy. For instance, using following GORM configuration in the application.groovy is not supported and will break the application:

grails.gorm.default.mapping = {
    id generator: 'identity'
}

Spring 5 and Spring Boot 2.1

Grails 4.0 is built on Spring 5 and Spring Boot 2.1. See the migration guide and release notes if you are using Spring specific features.

Hibernate 5.4 and GORM 7.x

Grails 4.x supports a minimum version of Hibernate 5.4 and GORM 7.x. Several changes have been made to GORM to support the newer version of Hibernate and simplify GORM itself.

The details of these changes are covered in the GORM upgrade documentation.

Spring Boot 2.1 Actuator

Please check the Spring Boot Actuator documentation since it has changed substantially from Spring Boot 1.5 the version Grails 3.x used.

If you had configuration such as:

grails-app/conf/application.yml - Grails 3.3.x
endpoints:
    enabled: false
    jmx:
        enabled: true
        unique-names: true

replace it with:

grails-app/conf/application.yml - Grails 4.x
spring:
    jmx:
        unique-names: true
management:
    endpoints:
        enabled-by-default: false

Spring Boot Developer Tools and Spring Loaded

Previous versions of Grails used a reloading agent called Spring Loaded. Since this library is no longer maintained and does not support Java 11 support for Spring Loaded has been removed.

As a replacement, Grails 4 applications include Spring Boot Developer Tools dependencies in the build.gradle build script. If you are migrating a Grails 3.x app, please include the following set of dependencies:

build.gradle
.
..
...
configurations {
    developmentOnly
    runtimeClasspath {
        extendsFrom developmentOnly
    }
}

dependencies {
        developmentOnly("org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-devtools")
        ...
        ..
}
...
..
.

Also you should configure the necessary excludes for Spring Developer Tools in application.yml:

spring:
    devtools:
        restart:
            exclude:
                - grails-app/views/**
                - grails-app/i18n/**
                - grails-app/conf/**

The above configuration prevents the server from restarting when views or message bundles are changed.

You can use Spring Developer Tools in combination with a browser extension such as the Chrome LiveReload extension to get automatic browser refresh when you change anything in your Grails application.

Spring Boot Gradle Plugin Changes

Grails 4 is built on top of Spring Boot 2.1. Grails 3 apps were built on top of Spring Boot 1.x.

Your Grails 3 app’s build.gradle may have such configuration:

build.gradle
bootRun {
    addResources = true
    ...
}

Grails 4 apps are built on top of Spring Boot 2.1. Starting from Spring Boot 2.0, the addResources property no longer exists. Instead, you need to set the sourceResources property to the source set that you want to use. Typically that’s sourceSets.main. This is described in the Spring Boot Gradle plugin’s documentation.

Your Grails 4 app’s build.gradle can be configured:

build.gradle
bootRun {
        sourceResources sourceSets.main
    ...
}

Building executable jars for Grails Plugins

The bootRepackage task has been replaced with bootJar and bootWar tasks for building executable jars and wars respectively. Both tasks extend their equivalent standard Gradle jar or war task, giving you access to all of the usual configuration options and behaviour.

If you had configuration such as:

build.gradle | Grails 3
// enable if you wish to package this plugin as a standalone application
bootRepackage.enabled = false

replace it with:

build.gradle | Grails 4
// enable if you wish to package this plugin as a standalone application
bootJar.enabled = false

Upgrading to Gradle 5

Grails 3 apps by default used Gradle 3.5. Grails 4 apps use Gradle 5.

To upgrade to Gradle 5 execute:

./gradlew wrapper --gradle-version 5.0

Due to changes in Gradle 5, transitive dependencies are no longer resolved for plugins. If your project makes use of a plugin that has transitive dependencies, you will need to add those explicitly to your build.gradle file.

If you customized your app’s build, other migrations may be necessary. Please check Gradle Upgrading your build documentation. Especially notice, that default Gradle daemon now starts with 512MB of heap instead of 1GB. Please check Default memory settings changed documentation.

Groovy language update to 2.5.6

Keep in mind, that with grails 4.0.x there is a minor groovy language upgrade (e.g. 3.3.9. used groovy 2.4.x), which requires a couple of changes, that are immediately obvious when trying to compile your source code. However there are also issues with changed implementations of core linkedlist functions! Check an overview of the breaking changes here: Breaking changes of Groovy 2.5

Removed date helper functions

Most common issue is that date util functions have been moved to individual project, e.g new Date().format("ddMMyyyy") no longer works without adding:

build.gradle
dependencies {
    compile "org.codehaus.groovy:groovy-dateutil:3.0.4"
}

Changed linked list method implementations

Check whether you are using the groovy version of linkedlist implementations:

  • [].pop() - will no longer remove the last, but the first element of the list. Replace it with [].removeLast() is recommended.

  • [].push(..) - will no longer add to the end, but to the beginning of the list. Replace it with [].add(..) is recommended.

H2 Web Console

Spring Boot 2.1 includes native support for the H2 database web console. Since this is already included in Spring Boot the equivalent feature has been removed from Grails. The H2 console is therefore now available at /h2-console instead of the previous URI of /dbconsole. See Using H2’s Web Console in the Spring Boot documentation for more information.

Upgrade Hibernate

If you were using GORM for Hibernate implementation in your Grails 3 app, you will need to upgrade to Hibernate 5.4.

A Grails 3 build.gradle such as:

build.gradle
dependencies {
...
  compile "org.grails.plugins:hibernate5"
  compile "org.hibernate:hibernate-core:5.1.5.Final"
}

will be in Grails 4:

build.gradle
dependencies {
...
  compile "org.grails.plugins:hibernate5"
  compile "org.hibernate:hibernate-core:5.4.0.Final"
}

Migrating to Geb 2.3

Geb 1.1.x (a JDK 1.7 compatible version) was the version shipped by default with Grails 3. Grails 4 is no longer compatible with Java 1.7. You should migrate to Geb 2.3.

In Grails 3, if your build.gradle looks like:

build.gradle
dependencies {
 testCompile "org.grails.plugins:geb:1.1.2"
 testRuntime "org.seleniumhq.selenium:selenium-htmlunit-driver:2.47.1"
 testRuntime "net.sourceforge.htmlunit:htmlunit:2.18"
}

In Grails 4, you should replace it with:

build.gradle
buildscript {
    repositories {
       ...
    }
    dependencies {
        ...
        classpath "gradle.plugin.com.energizedwork.webdriver-binaries:webdriver-binaries-gradle-plugin:$webdriverBinariesVersion" (1)
    }
}
...
..

repositories {
  ...
}

apply plugin:"idea"
...
...
apply plugin:"com.energizedwork.webdriver-binaries" (1)


dependencies {
...
    testCompile "org.grails.plugins:geb" (4)
    testRuntime "org.seleniumhq.selenium:selenium-chrome-driver:$seleniumVersion"  (5)
    testRuntime "org.seleniumhq.selenium:selenium-firefox-driver:$seleniumVersion" (5)
    testRuntime "org.seleniumhq.selenium:selenium-safari-driver:$seleniumSafariDriverVersion" (5)

    testCompile "org.seleniumhq.selenium:selenium-remote-driver:$seleniumVersion" (5)
    testCompile "org.seleniumhq.selenium:selenium-api:$seleniumVersion" (5)
    testCompile "org.seleniumhq.selenium:selenium-support:$seleniumVersion" (5)
}

webdriverBinaries {
    chromedriver "$chromeDriverVersion" (2)
    geckodriver "$geckodriverVersion" (3)
}

tasks.withType(Test) {
    systemProperty "geb.env", System.getProperty('geb.env')
    systemProperty "geb.build.reportsDir", reporting.file("geb/integrationTest")
    systemProperty "webdriver.chrome.driver", System.getProperty('webdriver.chrome.driver')
    systemProperty "webdriver.gecko.driver", System.getProperty('webdriver.gecko.driver')
}
gradle.properties
gebVersion=2.3
seleniumVersion=3.12.0
webdriverBinariesVersion=1.4
hibernateCoreVersion=5.1.5.Final
chromeDriverVersion=2.44 (2)
geckodriverVersion=0.23.0 (3)
seleniumSafariDriverVersion=3.14.0
1 Includes Webdriver binaries Gradle plugin.
2 Set the appropriate Webdriver for Chrome version.
3 Set the appropriate Webdriver for Firefox version.
4 Includes the Grails Geb Plugin dependency which has a transitive dependency to geb-spock. This is the dependency necessary to work with Geb and Spock.
5 Selenium and different driver dependencies.

Create also a Geb Configuration file at src/integration-test/resources/GebConfig.groovy.

src/integration-test/resources/GebConfig.groovy
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeOptions
import org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxDriver
import org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxOptions
import org.openqa.selenium.safari.SafariDriver

environments {

    // You need to configure in Safari -> Develop -> Allowed Remote Automation
    safari {
        driver = { new SafariDriver() }
    }

    // run via “./gradlew -Dgeb.env=chrome iT”
    chrome {
        driver = { new ChromeDriver() }
    }

    // run via “./gradlew -Dgeb.env=chromeHeadless iT”
    chromeHeadless {
        driver = {
            ChromeOptions o = new ChromeOptions()
            o.addArguments('headless')
            new ChromeDriver(o)
        }
    }

    // run via “./gradlew -Dgeb.env=firefoxHeadless iT”
    firefoxHeadless {
        driver = {
            FirefoxOptions o = new FirefoxOptions()
            o.addArguments('-headless')
            new FirefoxDriver(o)
        }
    }

    // run via “./gradlew -Dgeb.env=firefox iT”
    firefox {
        driver = { new FirefoxDriver() }
    }
}

Deprecated classes

The following classes, which were deprecated in Grails 3.x, have been removed in Grails 4. Please, check the list below to find a suitable replacement:

Removed Class

Alternative

org.grails.datastore.gorm.validation.constraints.UniqueConstraint

org.grails.datastore.gorm.validation.constraints.builtin.UniqueConstraint

grails.util.BuildScope

grails.transaction.GrailsTransactionTemplate

grails.gorm.transactions.GrailsTransactionTemplate

org.grails.transaction.transform.RollbackTransform

org.grails.datastore.gorm.transactions.transform.RollbackTransform

grails.transaction.NotTransactional

grails.gorm.transactions.NotTransactional

grails.transaction.Rollback

grails.gorm.transactions.Rollback

grails.transaction.Transactional

grails.gorm.transactions.Transactional

org.grails.config.FlatConfig

org.grails.core.metaclass.MetaClassEnhancer

Use traits instead.

org.grails.core.util.ClassPropertyFetcher

org.grails.datastore.mapping.reflect.ClassPropertyFetcher

org.grails.transaction.transform.TransactionalTransform

org.grails.datastore.gorm.transactions.transform.TransactionalTransform

grails.core.ComponentCapableDomainClass

grails.core.GrailsDomainClassProperty

Use the org.grails.datastore.mapping.model.MappingContext API instead

org.grails.core.DefaultGrailsDomainClassProperty

org.grails.core.MetaGrailsDomainClassProperty

org.grails.core.support.GrailsDomainConfigurationUtil

Use the org.grails.datastore.mapping.model.MappingContext and org.grails.datastore.mapping.model.MappingFactory APIs instead

org.grails.plugins.domain.DomainClassPluginSupport

org.grails.plugins.domain.support.GormApiSupport

org.grails.plugins.domain.support.GrailsDomainClassCleaner

Handled by org.grails.datastore.mapping.model.MappingContext now

grails.validation.AbstractConstraint

Use org.grails.datastore.gorm.validation.constraints.AbstractConstraint instead

grails.validation.AbstractVetoingConstraint

 org.grails.datastore.gorm.validation.constraints.AbstractVetoingConstraint

grails.validation.CascadingValidator

grails.gorm.validation.CascadingValidator

grails.validation.ConstrainedProperty

grails.gorm.validation.ConstrainedProperty

grails.validation.Constraint

grails.gorm.validation.Constraint

grails.validation.ConstraintFactory

org.grails.datastore.gorm.validation.constraints.factory.ConstraintFactory

grails.validation.VetoingConstraint

grails.gorm.validation.VetoingConstraint

grails.validation.ConstraintException

org.grails.validation.BlankConstraint

org.grails.datastore.gorm.validation.constraints.BlankConstraint

org.grails.validation.ConstrainedPropertyBuilder

org.grails.datastore.gorm.validation.constraints.builder.ConstrainedPropertyBuilder

org.grails.validation.ConstraintDelegate

org.grails.validation.ConstraintsEvaluatorFactoryBean

org.grails.datastore.gorm.validation.constraints.eval.ConstraintsEvaluator

org.grails.validation.CreditCardConstraint

org.grails.datastore.gorm.validation.constraints.CreditCardConstraint

org.grails.validation.DefaultConstraintEvaluator

org.grails.datastore.gorm.validation.constraints.eval.DefaultConstraintEvaluator

org.grails.validation.DomainClassPropertyComparator

org.grails.validation.EmailConstraint

org.grails.datastore.gorm.validation.constraints.EmailConstraint

org.grails.validation.GrailsDomainClassValidator

grails.gorm.validation.PersistentEntityValidator

org.grails.validation.InListConstraint

org.grails.datastore.gorm.validation.constraints.InListConstraint

org.grails.validation.MatchesConstraint

org.grails.datastore.gorm.validation.constraints.MatchesConstraint

org.grails.validation.MaxConstraint

org.grails.datastore.gorm.validation.constraints.MaxConstraint

org.grails.validation.MaxSizeConstraint

org.grails.datastore.gorm.validation.constraints.MaxSizeConstraint

org.grails.validation.MinConstraint

org.grails.datastore.gorm.validation.constraints.MinConstraint

org.grails.validation.MinSizeConstraint

org.grails.datastore.gorm.validation.constraints.MinSizeConstraint

org.grails.validation.NotEqualConstraint

org.grails.datastore.gorm.validation.constraints.NotEqualConstraint

org.grails.validation.NullableConstraint

org.grails.datastore.gorm.validation.constraints.NullableConstraint

org.grails.validation.RangeConstraint

org.grails.datastore.gorm.validation.constraints.RangeConstraint

org.grails.validation.ScaleConstraint

org.grails.datastore.gorm.validation.constraints.ScaleConstraint

org.grails.validation.SizeConstraint

org.grails.datastore.gorm.validation.constraints.SizeConstraint

org.grails.validation.UrlConstraint

org.grails.datastore.gorm.validation.constraints.UrlConstraint

org.grails.validation.ValidatorConstraint

org.grails.datastore.gorm.validation.constraints.ValidatorConstraint

org.grails.validation.routines.DomainValidator

Replaced by newer version of commons-validation

org.grails.validation.routines.InetAddressValidator

Replaced by newer version of commons-validation

org.grails.validation.routines.RegexValidator

Replaced by newer version of commons-validation

org.grails.validation.routines.ResultPair

Replaced by newer version of commons-validation

org.grails.validation.routines.UrlValidator

Replaced by newer version of commons-validation

grails.web.JSONBuilder

groovy.json.StreamingJsonBuilder

Grails-Java8

For those who have added a dependency on the grails-java8 plugin, all you should need to do is simply remove the dependency. All of the classes in the plugin have been moved out to their respective projects.

Profiles Deprecation

A few of the profiles supported in Grails 3.x will no longer be maintained going forward and as a result it is no longer possible to create applications when them in the shorthand form. When upgrading existing projects, it will be necessary to supply the version for these profiles.

  • org.grails.profiles:angularjsorg.grails.profiles:angularjs:1.1.2

  • org.grails.profiles:webpackorg.grails.profiles:webpack:1.1.6

  • org.grails.profiles:react-webpackorg.grails.profiles:react-webpack:1.0.8

Scheduled Methods

In Grails 3 no configuration or additional changes were necessary to use the Spring @Scheduled annotation. In Grails 4 you must apply the @EnableScheduling annotation to your application class in order for scheduling to work.

4 Configuration

It may seem odd that in a framework that embraces "convention-over-configuration" that we tackle this topic now. With Grails' default settings you can actually develop an application without doing any configuration whatsoever, as the quick start demonstrates, but it’s important to learn where and how to override the conventions when you need to. Later sections of the user guide will mention what configuration settings you can use, but not how to set them. The assumption is that you have at least read the first section of this chapter!

4.1 Basic Configuration

Configuration in Grails is generally split across 2 areas: build configuration and runtime configuration.

Build configuration is generally done via Gradle and the build.gradle file. Runtime configuration is by default specified in YAML in the grails-app/conf/application.yml file.

If you prefer to use Grails 2.0-style Groovy configuration then it is possible to specify configuration using Groovy’s ConfigSlurper syntax. Two Groovy configuration files are available: grails-app/conf/application.groovy and grails-app/conf/runtime.groovy:

  1. Use application.groovy for configuration that doesn’t depend on application classes

  2. Use runtime.groovy for configuration that does depend on application classes

This separation is necessary because configuration values defined in application.groovy are available to the Grails CLI, which needs to be able to load application.groovy before the application has been compiled. References to application classes in application.groovy will cause an exception when these commands are executed by the CLI:

Error occurred running Grails CLI:
startup failed:script14738267015581837265078.groovy: 13: unable to resolve class com.foo.Bar

For Groovy configuration the following variables are available to the configuration script:

Variable Description

userHome

Location of the home directory for the account that is running the Grails application.

grailsHome

Location of the directory where you installed Grails. If the GRAILS_HOME environment variable is set, it is used.

appName

The application name as it appears in build.gradle.

appVersion

The application version as it appears in build.gradle.

For example:

my.tmp.dir = "${userHome}/.grails/tmp"

Accessing Configuration with GrailsApplication

If you want to read runtime configuration settings, i.e. those defined in application.yml, use the grailsApplication object, which is available as a variable in controllers and tag libraries:

class MyController {
    def hello() {
        def recipient = grailsApplication.config.getProperty('foo.bar.hello')

        render "Hello ${recipient}"
    }
}

The config property of the grailsApplication object is an instance of the Config interface and provides a number of useful methods to read the configuration of the application.

In particular, the getProperty method (seen above) is useful for efficiently retrieving configuration properties, while specifying the property type (the default type is String) and/or providing a default fallback value.

class MyController {

    def hello(Recipient recipient) {
        //Retrieve Integer property 'foo.bar.max.hellos', otherwise use value of 5
        def max = grailsApplication.config.getProperty('foo.bar.max.hellos', Integer, 5)

        //Retrieve property 'foo.bar.greeting' without specifying type (default is String), otherwise use value "Hello"
        def greeting = grailsApplication.config.getProperty('foo.bar.greeting', "Hello")

        def message = (recipient.receivedHelloCount >= max) ?
          "Sorry, you've been greeted the max number of times" :  "${greeting}, ${recipient}"
        }

        render message
    }
}

Notice that the Config instance is a merged configuration based on Spring’s PropertySource concept and reads configuration from the environment, system properties and the local application configuration merging them into a single object.

GrailsApplication can be easily injected into services and other Grails artifacts:

import grails.core.*

class MyService {
    GrailsApplication grailsApplication

    String greeting() {
        def recipient = grailsApplication.config.getProperty('foo.bar.hello')
        return "Hello ${recipient}"
    }
}

GrailsConfigurationAware Interface

Accessing configuration dynamically at runtime can have a small effect on application performance. An alternative approach is to implement the GrailsConfigurationAware interface, which provides a setConfiguration method that accepts the application configuration as a parameter when the class is initialized. You can then assign relevant configuration properties to instance properties on the class for later usage.

The Config instance has the same properties and usage as the injected GrailsApplication config object. Here is the service class from the previous example, using GrailsConfigurationAware instead of injecting GrailsApplication:

import grails.core.support.GrailsConfigurationAware

class MyService implements GrailsConfigurationAware {

    String recipient

    String greeting() {
        return "Hello ${recipient}"
    }

    void setConfiguration(Config config) {
        recipient = config.getProperty('foo.bar.hello')
    }

}

Spring Value Annotation

You can use Spring’s Value annotation to inject configuration values:

import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.*

class MyController {
    @Value('${foo.bar.hello}')
    String recipient

    def hello() {
        render "Hello ${recipient}"
    }
}
In Groovy code you must use single quotes around the string for the value of the Value annotation otherwise it is interpreted as a GString not a Spring expression.

As you can see, when accessing configuration settings you use the same dot notation as when you define them.

4.1.1 Options for the YML format Config

The application.yml file was introduced in Grails 3.0, and YAML is now the preferred format for configuration files.

Using system properties / command line arguments

Suppose you are using the JDBC_CONNECTION_STRING command line argument and you want to access the same in the yml file then it can be done in the following manner:

production:
    dataSource:
        url: '${JDBC_CONNECTION_STRING}'

Similarly system arguments can be accessed.

You will need to have this in build.gradle to modify the bootRun target if grails run-app is used to start the application

bootRun {
    systemProperties = System.properties
}

For testing the following will need to change the test task as follows

test {
    systemProperties = System.properties
}

External configuration

Grails will read application.(properties|yml) from the ./config or the current directory by default. As Grails is a SpringBoot configuration options are available as well, for documentation please consult: https://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/2.5.2/reference/html/features.html#features.external-config.files

4.1.2 Built in options

Grails has a set of core settings that are worth knowing about. Their defaults are suitable for most projects, but it’s important to understand what they do because you may need one or more of them later.

Runtime settings

On the runtime front, i.e. grails-app/conf/application.yml, there are quite a few more core settings:

  • grails.enable.native2ascii - Set this to false if you do not require native2ascii conversion of Grails i18n properties files (default: true).

  • grails.views.default.codec - Sets the default encoding regime for GSPs - can be one of 'none', 'html', or 'base64' (default: 'none'). To reduce risk of XSS attacks, set this to 'html'.

  • grails.views.gsp.encoding - The file encoding used for GSP source files (default: 'utf-8').

  • grails.mime.file.extensions - Whether to use the file extension to dictate the mime type in Content Negotiation (default: true).

  • grails.mime.types - A map of supported mime types used for Content Negotiation.

  • grails.serverURL - A string specifying the server URL portion of absolute links, including server name e.g. grails.serverURL="http://my.yourportal.com". See createLink. Also used by redirects.

  • grails.views.gsp.sitemesh.preprocess - Determines whether SiteMesh preprocessing happens. Disabling this slows down page rendering, but if you need SiteMesh to parse the generated HTML from a GSP view then disabling it is the right option. Don’t worry if you don’t understand this advanced property: leave it set to true.

  • grails.reload.excludes and grails.reload.includes - Configuring these directives determines the reload behavior for project specific source files. Each directive takes a list of strings that are the class names for project source files that should be excluded from reloading behavior or included accordingly when running the application in development with the run-app command. If the grails.reload.includes directive is configured, then only the classes in that list will be reloaded.

4.1.3 Logging

Since Grails 3.0, logging is handled by the Logback logging framework and can be configured with the grails-app/conf/logback.groovy file.

If you prefer XML you can replace the logback.groovy file with a logback.xml file instead.

For more information on configuring logging refer to the Logback documentation on the subject.

4.1.3.1 Logger Names

Grails artifacts (controllers, services …​) get injected a log property automatically.

Prior to Grails 3.3.0, the name of the logger for Grails Artifact followed the convention grails.app.<type>.<className>, where type is the type of the artifact, for example, controllers or services, and className is the fully qualified name of the artifact.

Grails 3.3.x simplifies logger names. The next examples illustrate the changes:

BookController.groovy located at grails-app/controllers/com/company NOT annotated with @Slf4j

Logger Name (Grails 3.3.x or higher)

Logger Name (Grails 3.2.x or lower)

com.company.BookController

grails.app.controllers.com.company.BookController

BookController.groovy located at grails-app/controllers/com/company annotated with @Slf4j

Logger Name (Grails 3.3.x or higher)

Logger Name (Grails 3.2.x or lower)

com.company.BookController

com.company.BookController

BookService.groovy located at grails-app/services/com/company NOT annotated with @Slf4j

Logger Name (Grails 3.3.x or higher)

Logger Name (Grails 3.2.x or lower)

com.company.BookService

grails.app.services.com.company.BookService

BookService.groovy located at grails-app/services/com/company annotated with @Slf4j

Logger Name (Grails 3.3.x or higher)

Logger Name (Grails 3.2.x or lower)

com.company.BookService

com.company.BookService

BookDetail.groovy located at src/main/groovy/com/company annotated with @Slf4j

Logger Name (Grails 3.3.x or higher)

Logger Name (Grails 3.2.x or lower)

com.company.BookDetail

com.company.BookDetail

4.1.3.2 Masking Request Parameters From Stacktrace Logs

When Grails logs a stacktrace, the log message may include the names and values of all of the request parameters for the current request. To mask out the values of secure request parameters, specify the parameter names in the grails.exceptionresolver.params.exclude config property:

grails-app/conf/application.yml
grails:
    exceptionresolver:
        params:
            exclude:
                - password
                - creditCard

Request parameter logging may be turned off altogether by setting the grails.exceptionresolver.logRequestParameters config property to false. The default value is true when the application is running in DEVELOPMENT mode and false for all other environments.

grails-app/conf/application.yml
grails:
    exceptionresolver:
        logRequestParameters: false

4.1.3.3 External Configuration File

If you set the configuration property logging.config, you can instruct Logback to use an external configuration file.

grails-app/conf/application.yml
logging:
    config: /Users/me/config/logback.groovy

Alternatively, you can supply the configuration file location with a system property:

$ ./gradlew -Dlogging.config=/Users/me/config/logback.groovy bootRun

Or, you could use an environment variable:

$ export LOGGING_CONFIG=/Users/me/config/logback.groovy
$ ./gradlew bootRun

4.1.4 GORM

Grails provides the following GORM configuration options:

  • grails.gorm.failOnError - If set to true, causes the save() method on domain classes to throw a grails.validation.ValidationException if validation fails during a save. This option may also be assigned a list of Strings representing package names. If the value is a list of Strings then the failOnError behavior will only be applied to domain classes in those packages (including sub-packages). See the save method docs for more information.

For example, to enable failOnError for all domain classes:

grails:
    gorm:
        failOnError: true

and to enable failOnError for domain classes by package:

grails:
    gorm:
        failOnError:
            - com.companyname.somepackage
            - com.companyname.someotherpackage

4.1.5 Configuring an HTTP proxy

To setup Grails to use an HTTP proxy there are two steps. Firstly you need to configure the grails CLI to be aware of the proxy if you wish to use it to create applications and so on. This can be done using the GRAILS_OPTS environment variable, for example on Unix systems:

export GRAILS_OPTS="-Dhttps.proxyHost=127.0.0.1 -Dhttps.proxyPort=3128 -Dhttp.proxyUser=test -Dhttp.proxyPassword=test"
The default profile repository is resolved over HTTPS so https.proxyPort and https.proxyUser are used, however the username and password are specified with http.proxyUser and http.proxyPassword

For Windows systems the environment variable can be configured under My Computer/Advanced/Environment Variables.

With this configuration in place the grails command can connect and authenticate via a proxy.

Secondly, since Grails uses Gradle as the build system, you need to configure Gradle to authenticate via the proxy. For instructions on how to do this see the Gradle user guide section on the topic.

4.2 The Application Class

Every new Grails application features an Application class within the grails-app/init directory.

The Application class subclasses the GrailsAutoConfiguration class and features a static void main method, meaning it can be run as a regular application.

4.2.1 Executing the Application Class

There are several ways to execute the Application class, if you are using an IDE then you can simply right click on the class and run it directly from your IDE which will start your Grails application.

This is also useful for debugging since you can debug directly from the IDE without having to connect a remote debugger when using the run-app --debug-jvm command from the command line.

You can also package your application into a runnable WAR file, for example:

$ grails package
$ java -jar build/libs/myapp-0.1.war

This is useful if you plan to deploy your application using a container-less approach.

4.2.2 Customizing the Application Class

There are several ways in which you can customize the Application class.

Customizing Scanning

By default Grails will scan all known source directories for controllers, domain class etc., however if there are packages in other JAR files you wish to scan you can do so by overriding the packageNames() method of the Application class:

class Application extends GrailsAutoConfiguration {
    @Override
    Collection<String> packageNames() {
        super.packageNames() + ['my.additional.package']
    }

    ...
}

Registering Additional Beans

The Application class can also be used as a source for Spring bean definitions, simply define a method annotated with the Bean and the returned object will become a Spring bean. The name of the method is used as the bean name:

class Application extends GrailsAutoConfiguration {
    @Bean
    MyType myBean() {
        return new MyType()
    }

    ...
}

4.2.3 The Application LifeCycle

The Application class also implements the GrailsApplicationLifeCycle interface which all plugins implement.

This means that the Application class can be used to perform the same functions as a plugin. You can override the regular plugins hooks such as doWithSpring, doWithApplicationContext and so on by overriding the appropriate method:

class Application extends GrailsAutoConfiguration {
    @Override
    Closure doWithSpring() {
        {->
            mySpringBean(MyType)
        }
    }

    ...
}

4.3 Environments

Per Environment Configuration

Grails supports the concept of per environment configuration. The application.yml and application.groovy files in the grails-app/conf directory can use per-environment configuration using either YAML or the syntax provided by ConfigSlurper. As an example consider the following default application.yml definition provided by Grails:

environments:
    development:
        dataSource:
            dbCreate: create-drop
            url: jdbc:h2:mem:devDb;MVCC=TRUE;LOCK_TIMEOUT=10000;DB_CLOSE_ON_EXIT=FALSE
    test:
        dataSource:
            dbCreate: update
            url: jdbc:h2:mem:testDb;MVCC=TRUE;LOCK_TIMEOUT=10000;DB_CLOSE_ON_EXIT=FALSE
    production:
        dataSource:
            dbCreate: update
            url: jdbc:h2:prodDb;MVCC=TRUE;LOCK_TIMEOUT=10000;DB_CLOSE_ON_EXIT=FALSE
            properties:
               jmxEnabled: true
               initialSize: 5
        ...

The above can be expressed in Groovy syntax in application.groovy as follows:

dataSource {
    pooled = false
    driverClassName = "org.h2.Driver"
    username = "sa"
    password = ""
}
environments {
    development {
        dataSource {
            dbCreate = "create-drop"
            url = "jdbc:h2:mem:devDb"
        }
    }
    test {
        dataSource {
            dbCreate = "update"
            url = "jdbc:h2:mem:testDb"
        }
    }
    production {
        dataSource {
            dbCreate = "update"
            url = "jdbc:h2:prodDb"
            properties {
               jmxEnabled = true
               initialSize = 5
            }
        }
    }
}

Notice how the common configuration is provided at the top level and then an environments block specifies per environment settings for the dbCreate and url properties of the DataSource.

Packaging and Running for Different Environments

Grails' command line has built in capabilities to execute any command within the context of a specific environment. The format is:

grails <<environment>> <<command name>>

In addition, there are 3 preset environments known to Grails: dev, prod, and test for development, production and test. For example to create a WAR for the test environment you would run:

grails test war

To target other environments you can pass a grails.env variable to any command:

grails -Dgrails.env=UAT run-app

Programmatic Environment Detection

Within your code, such as in a Gant script or a bootstrap class you can detect the environment using the Environment class:

import grails.util.Environment

...

switch (Environment.current) {
    case Environment.DEVELOPMENT:
        configureForDevelopment()
        break
    case Environment.PRODUCTION:
        configureForProduction()
        break
}

Per Environment Bootstrapping

It’s often desirable to run code when your application starts up on a per-environment basis. To do so you can use the grails-app/init/BootStrap.groovy file’s support for per-environment execution:

def init = { ServletContext ctx ->
    environments {
        production {
            ctx.setAttribute("env", "prod")
        }
        development {
            ctx.setAttribute("env", "dev")
        }
    }
    ctx.setAttribute("foo", "bar")
}

Generic Per Environment Execution

The previous BootStrap example uses the grails.util.Environment class internally to execute. You can also use this class yourself to execute your own environment specific logic:

Environment.executeForCurrentEnvironment {
    production {
        // do something in production
    }
    development {
        // do something only in development
    }
}

4.4 The DataSource

Since Grails is built on Java technology setting up a data source requires some knowledge of JDBC (the technology that stands for Java Database Connectivity).

If you use a database other than H2 you need a JDBC driver. For example for MySQL you would need Connector/J.

Drivers typically come in the form of a JAR archive. It’s best to use the dependency resolution to resolve the jar if it’s available in a Maven repository, for example you could add a dependency for the MySQL driver like this:

dependencies {
    runtime 'mysql:mysql-connector-java:5.1.29'
}

Once you have the JAR resolved you need to get familiar with how Grails manages its database configuration. The configuration can be maintained in either grails-app/conf/application.groovy or grails-app/conf/application.yml. These files contain the dataSource definition which includes the following settings:

  • driverClassName - The class name of the JDBC driver

  • username - The username used to establish a JDBC connection

  • password - The password used to establish a JDBC connection

  • url - The JDBC URL of the database

  • dbCreate - Whether to auto-generate the database from the domain model - one of 'create-drop', 'create', 'update', 'validate', or 'none'

  • pooled - Whether to use a pool of connections (defaults to true)

  • logSql - Enable SQL logging to stdout

  • formatSql - Format logged SQL

  • dialect - A String or Class that represents the Hibernate dialect used to communicate with the database. See the org.hibernate.dialect package for available dialects.

  • readOnly - If true makes the DataSource read-only, which results in the connection pool calling setReadOnly(true) on each Connection

  • transactional - If false leaves the DataSource’s transactionManager bean outside the chained BE1PC transaction manager implementation. This only applies to additional datasources.

  • persistenceInterceptor - The default datasource is automatically wired up to the persistence interceptor, other datasources are not wired up automatically unless this is set to true

  • properties - Extra properties to set on the DataSource bean. See the Tomcat Pool documentation. There is also a Javadoc format documentation of the properties.

  • jmxExport - If false, will disable registration of JMX MBeans for all DataSources. By default JMX MBeans are added for DataSources with jmxEnabled = true in properties.

  • type - The connection pool class if you want to force Grails to use it when there are more than one available.

A typical configuration for MySQL in application.groovy may be something like:

dataSource {
    pooled = true
    dbCreate = "update"
    url = "jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/my_database"
    driverClassName = "com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"
    dialect = org.hibernate.dialect.MySQL5InnoDBDialect
    username = "username"
    password = "password"
    type = "com.zaxxer.hikari.HikariDataSource"
    properties {
       jmxEnabled = true
       initialSize = 5
       maxActive = 50
       minIdle = 5
       maxIdle = 25
       maxWait = 10000
       maxAge = 10 * 60000
       timeBetweenEvictionRunsMillis = 5000
       minEvictableIdleTimeMillis = 60000
       validationQuery = "SELECT 1"
       validationQueryTimeout = 3
       validationInterval = 15000
       testOnBorrow = true
       testWhileIdle = true
       testOnReturn = false
       jdbcInterceptors = "ConnectionState;StatementCache(max=200)"
       defaultTransactionIsolation = java.sql.Connection.TRANSACTION_READ_COMMITTED
    }
}
When configuring the DataSource do not include the type or the def keyword before any of the configuration settings as Groovy will treat these as local variable definitions and they will not be processed. For example the following is invalid:
dataSource {
    boolean pooled = true // type declaration results in ignored local variable
    ...
}

Example of advanced configuration using extra properties:

dataSource {
    pooled = true
    dbCreate = "update"
    url = "jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/my_database"
    driverClassName = "com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"
    dialect = org.hibernate.dialect.MySQL5InnoDBDialect
    username = "username"
    password = "password"
    type = "com.zaxxer.hikari.HikariDataSource"
    properties {
       // Documentation for Tomcat JDBC Pool
       // http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-7.0-doc/jdbc-pool.html#Common_Attributes
       // https://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-7.0-doc/api/org/apache/tomcat/jdbc/pool/PoolConfiguration.html
       jmxEnabled = true
       initialSize = 5
       maxActive = 50
       minIdle = 5
       maxIdle = 25
       maxWait = 10000
       maxAge = 10 * 60000
       timeBetweenEvictionRunsMillis = 5000
       minEvictableIdleTimeMillis = 60000
       validationQuery = "SELECT 1"
       validationQueryTimeout = 3
       validationInterval = 15000
       testOnBorrow = true
       testWhileIdle = true
       testOnReturn = false
       ignoreExceptionOnPreLoad = true
       // http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-7.0-doc/jdbc-pool.html#JDBC_interceptors
       jdbcInterceptors = "ConnectionState;StatementCache(max=200)"
       defaultTransactionIsolation = java.sql.Connection.TRANSACTION_READ_COMMITTED // safe default
       // controls for leaked connections
       abandonWhenPercentageFull = 100 // settings are active only when pool is full
       removeAbandonedTimeout = 120
       removeAbandoned = true
       // use JMX console to change this setting at runtime
       logAbandoned = false // causes stacktrace recording overhead, use only for debugging
       // JDBC driver properties
       // Mysql as example
       dbProperties {
           // Mysql specific driver properties
           // http://dev.mysql.com/doc/connector-j/en/connector-j-reference-configuration-properties.html
           // let Tomcat JDBC Pool handle reconnecting
           autoReconnect=false
           // truncation behaviour
           jdbcCompliantTruncation=false
           // mysql 0-date conversion
           zeroDateTimeBehavior='convertToNull'
           // Tomcat JDBC Pool's StatementCache is used instead, so disable mysql driver's cache
           cachePrepStmts=false
           cacheCallableStmts=false
           // Tomcat JDBC Pool's StatementFinalizer keeps track
           dontTrackOpenResources=true
           // performance optimization: reduce number of SQLExceptions thrown in mysql driver code
           holdResultsOpenOverStatementClose=true
           // enable MySQL query cache - using server prep stmts will disable query caching
           useServerPrepStmts=false
           // metadata caching
           cacheServerConfiguration=true
           cacheResultSetMetadata=true
           metadataCacheSize=100
           // timeouts for TCP/IP
           connectTimeout=15000
           socketTimeout=120000
           // timer tuning (disable)
           maintainTimeStats=false
           enableQueryTimeouts=false
           // misc tuning
           noDatetimeStringSync=true
       }
    }
}

More on dbCreate

Hibernate can automatically create the database tables required for your domain model. You have some control over when and how it does this through the dbCreate property, which can take these values:

  • create - Drops the existing schema and creates the schema on startup, dropping existing tables, indexes, etc. first.

  • create-drop - Same as create, but also drops the tables when the application shuts down cleanly.

  • update - Creates missing tables and indexes, and updates the current schema without dropping any tables or data. Note that this can’t properly handle many schema changes like column renames (you’re left with the old column containing the existing data).

  • validate - Makes no changes to your database. Compares the configuration with the existing database schema and reports warnings.

  • any other value - does nothing

Setting the dbCreate setting to "none" is recommended once your schema is relatively stable and definitely when your application and database are deployed in production. Database changes are then managed through proper migrations, either with SQL scripts or a migration tool like Flyway or Liquibase. The Database Migration plugin uses Liquibase.

4.4.1 DataSources and Environments

The previous example configuration assumes you want the same config for all environments: production, test, development etc.

Grails' DataSource definition is "environment aware", however, so you can do:

dataSource {
    pooled = true
    driverClassName = "com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"
    dialect = org.hibernate.dialect.MySQL5InnoDBDialect
    // other common settings here
}

environments {
    production {
        dataSource {
            url = "jdbc:mysql://liveip.com/liveDb"
            // other environment-specific settings here
        }
    }
}

4.4.2 Automatic Database Migration

The dbCreate property of the DataSource definition is important as it dictates what Grails should do at runtime with regards to automatically generating the database tables from GORM classes. The options are described in the DataSource section:

  • create

  • create-drop

  • update

  • validate

  • no value

In development mode dbCreate is by default set to "create-drop", but at some point in development (and certainly once you go to production) you’ll need to stop dropping and re-creating the database every time you start up your server.

It’s tempting to switch to update so you retain existing data and only update the schema when your code changes, but Hibernate’s update support is very conservative. It won’t make any changes that could result in data loss, and doesn’t detect renamed columns or tables, so you’ll be left with the old one and will also have the new one.

Grails supports migrations with Liquibase or Flyway via plugins.

4.4.3 Transaction-aware DataSource Proxy

The actual dataSource bean is wrapped in a transaction-aware proxy so you will be given the connection that’s being used by the current transaction or Hibernate Session if one is active.

If this were not the case, then retrieving a connection from the dataSource would be a new connection, and you wouldn’t be able to see changes that haven’t been committed yet (assuming you have a sensible transaction isolation setting, e.g. READ_COMMITTED or better).

4.4.4 Database Console

The H2 database console is a convenient feature of H2 that provides a web-based interface to any database that you have a JDBC driver for, and it’s very useful to view the database you’re developing against. It’s especially useful when running against an in-memory database.

You can access the console by navigating to http://localhost:8080/h2-console in a browser. See the Spring Boot H2 Console Documentation for more information on the options available.

4.4.5 Multiple Datasources

By default all domain classes share a single DataSource and a single database, but you have the option to partition your domain classes into two or more data sources.

Configuring Additional DataSources

The default DataSource configuration in grails-app/conf/application.yml looks something like this:

dataSource:
    pooled: true
    jmxExport: true
    driverClassName: org.h2.Driver
    username: sa
    password:

environments:
    development:
        dataSource:
            dbCreate: create-drop
            url: jdbc:h2:mem:devDb;MVCC=TRUE;LOCK_TIMEOUT=10000;DB_CLOSE_ON_EXIT=FALSE
    test:
        dataSource:
            dbCreate: update
            url: jdbc:h2:mem:testDb;MVCC=TRUE;LOCK_TIMEOUT=10000;DB_CLOSE_ON_EXIT=FALSE
    production:
        dataSource:
            dbCreate: update
            url: jdbc:h2:prodDb;MVCC=TRUE;LOCK_TIMEOUT=10000;DB_CLOSE_ON_EXIT=FALSE
            properties:
               jmxEnabled: true
               initialSize: 5

This configures a single DataSource with the Spring bean named dataSource. To configure extra data sources, add a dataSources block (at the top level, in an environment block, or both, just like the standard DataSource definition) with a custom name. For example, this configuration adds a second DataSource, using MySQL in the development environment and Oracle in production:

dataSource:
    pooled: true
    jmxExport: true
    driverClassName: org.h2.Driver
    username: sa
    password:

dataSources:
    lookup:
        dialect: org.hibernate.dialect.MySQLInnoDBDialect
        driverClassName: com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
        username: lookup
        password: secret
        url: jdbc:mysql://localhost/lookup
        dbCreate: update

environments:
    development:
        dataSource:
            dbCreate: create-drop
            url: jdbc:h2:mem:devDb;MVCC=TRUE;LOCK_TIMEOUT=10000;DB_CLOSE_ON_EXIT=FALSE
    test:
        dataSource:
            dbCreate: update
            url: jdbc:h2:mem:testDb;MVCC=TRUE;LOCK_TIMEOUT=10000;DB_CLOSE_ON_EXIT=FALSE
    production:
        dataSource:
            dbCreate: update
            url: jdbc:h2:prodDb;MVCC=TRUE;LOCK_TIMEOUT=10000;DB_CLOSE_ON_EXIT=FALSE
            properties:
                jmxEnabled: true
                initialSize: 5
                ...
        dataSources:
            lookup:
                dialect: org.hibernate.dialect.Oracle10gDialect
                driverClassName: oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleDriver
                username: lookup
                password: secret
                url: jdbc:oracle:thin:@localhost:1521:lookup
                dbCreate: update

You can use the same or different databases as long as they’re supported by Hibernate.

If you need to inject the lookup datasource in a Grails artefact, you can do it like this:

DataSource dataSource_lookup
While defining multiple data sources, one of them must be named "dataSource". This is required because Grails determines which data source is the default by determining which one is named "dataSource".

Configuring Domain Classes

If a domain class has no DataSource configuration, it defaults to the standard 'dataSource'. Set the datasource property in the mapping block to configure a non-default DataSource. For example, if you want to use the ZipCode domain to use the 'lookup' DataSource, configure it like this:

class ZipCode {

   String code

   static mapping = {
      datasource 'lookup'
   }
}

A domain class can also use two or more data sources. Use the datasources property with a list of names to configure more than one, for example:

class ZipCode {

   String code

   static mapping = {
      datasources(['lookup', 'auditing'])
   }
}

If a domain class uses the default DataSource and one or more others, use the special name 'DEFAULT' to indicate the default DataSource:

class ZipCode {

   String code

   static mapping = {
      datasources(['lookup', 'DEFAULT'])
   }
}

If a domain class uses all configured data sources, use the special value 'ALL':

class ZipCode {

   String code

   static mapping = {
      datasource 'ALL'
   }
}

Namespaces and GORM Methods

If a domain class uses more than one DataSource then you can use the namespace implied by each DataSource name to make GORM calls for a particular DataSource. For example, consider this class which uses two data sources:

class ZipCode {

   String code

   static mapping = {
      datasources(['lookup', 'auditing'])
   }
}

The first DataSource specified is the default when not using an explicit namespace, so in this case we default to 'lookup'. But you can call GORM methods on the 'auditing' DataSource with the DataSource name, for example:

def zipCode = ZipCode.auditing.get(42)
...
zipCode.auditing.save()

As you can see, you add the DataSource to the method call in both the static case and the instance case.

Hibernate Mapped Domain Classes

You can also partition annotated Java classes into separate datasources. Classes using the default datasource are registered in grails-app/conf/hibernate.cfg.xml. To specify that an annotated class uses a non-default datasource, create a hibernate.cfg.xml file for that datasource with the file name prefixed with the datasource name.

For example if the Book class is in the default datasource, you would register that in grails-app/conf/hibernate.cfg.xml:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
<!DOCTYPE hibernate-configuration PUBLIC
          '-//Hibernate/Hibernate Configuration DTD 3.0//EN'
          'http://hibernate.sourceforge.net/hibernate-configuration-3.0.dtd'>
<hibernate-configuration>
   <session-factory>
      <mapping class='org.example.Book'/>
   </session-factory>
</hibernate-configuration>

and if the Library class is in the "ds2" datasource, you would register that in grails-app/conf/ds2_hibernate.cfg.xml:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
<!DOCTYPE hibernate-configuration PUBLIC
          '-//Hibernate/Hibernate Configuration DTD 3.0//EN'
          'http://hibernate.sourceforge.net/hibernate-configuration-3.0.dtd'>
<hibernate-configuration>
   <session-factory>
      <mapping class='org.example.Library'/>
   </session-factory>
</hibernate-configuration>

The process is the same for classes mapped with hbm.xml files - just list them in the appropriate hibernate.cfg.xml file.

Services

Like Domain classes, by default Services use the default DataSource and PlatformTransactionManager. To configure a Service to use a different DataSource, use the static datasource property, for example:

class DataService {

   static datasource = 'lookup'

   void someMethod(...) {
      ...
   }
}

A transactional service can only use a single DataSource, so be sure to only make changes for domain classes whose DataSource is the same as the Service.

Note that the datasource specified in a service has no bearing on which datasources are used for domain classes; that’s determined by their declared datasources in the domain classes themselves. It’s used to declare which transaction manager to use.

If you have a Foo domain class in dataSource1 and a Bar domain class in dataSource2, if WahooService uses dataSource1, a service method that saves a new Foo and a new Bar will only be transactional for Foo since they share the same datasource. The transaction won’t affect the Bar instance. If you want both to be transactional you’d need to use two services and XA datasources for two-phase commit, e.g. with the Atomikos plugin.

Transactions across multiple data sources

Grails does not by default try to handle transactions that span multiple data sources.

You can enable Grails to use the Best Effort 1PC pattern for handling transactions across multiple datasources. To do so you must set the grails.transaction.chainedTransactionManagerPostProcessor.enabled setting to true in application.yml:

grails:
  transaction:
    chainedTransactionManagerPostProcessor:
      enabled: true

The Best Efforts 1PC pattern is fairly general but can fail in some circumstances that the developer must be aware of.

This is a non-XA pattern that involves a synchronized single-phase commit of a number of resources. Because the 2PC is not used, it can never be as safe as an XA transaction, but is often good enough if the participants are aware of the compromises.

The basic idea is to delay the commit of all resources as late as possible in a transaction so that the only thing that can go wrong is an infrastructure failure (not a business-processing error). Systems that rely on Best Efforts 1PC reason that infrastructure failures are rare enough that they can afford to take the risk in return for higher throughput. If business-processing services are also designed to be idempotent, then little can go wrong in practice.

The BE1PC implementation was added in Grails 2.3.6. . Before this change additional datasources didn’t take part in transactions initiated in Grails. The transactions in additional datasources were basically in auto commit mode. In some cases this might be the wanted behavior. One reason might be performance: on the start of each new transaction, the BE1PC transaction manager creates a new transaction to each datasource. It’s possible to leave an additional datasource out of the BE1PC transaction manager by setting transactional = false in the respective configuration block of the additional dataSource. Datasources with readOnly = true will also be left out of the chained transaction manager (since 2.3.7).

By default, the BE1PC implementation will add all beans implementing the Spring PlatformTransactionManager interface to the chained BE1PC transaction manager. For example, a possible JMSTransactionManager bean in the Grails application context would be added to the Grails BE1PC transaction manager’s chain of transaction managers.

You can exclude transaction manager beans from the BE1PC implementation with this configuration option:

grails:
  transaction:
    chainedTransactionManagerPostProcessor:
      enabled: true
      blacklistPattern: '.*'

The exclude matching is done on the name of the transaction manager bean. The transaction managers of datasources with transactional = false or readOnly = true will be skipped and using this configuration option is not required in that case.

XA and Two-phase Commit

When the Best Efforts 1PC pattern isn’t suitable for handling transactions across multiple transactional resources (not only datasources), there are several options available for adding XA/2PC support to Grails applications.

The Spring transactions documentation contains information about integrating the JTA/XA transaction manager of different application servers. In this case, you can configure a bean with the name transactionManager manually in resources.groovy or resources.xml file.

4.5 Versioning

Detecting Versions at Runtime

You can detect the application version using Grails' support for application metadata using the GrailsApplication class. For example within controllers there is an implicit grailsApplication variable that can be used:

def version = grailsApplication.metadata.getApplicationVersion()

You can retrieve the version of Grails that is running with:

def grailsVersion = grailsApplication.metadata.getGrailsVersion()

or the GrailsUtil class:

import grails.util.GrailsUtil
...
def grailsVersion = GrailsUtil.grailsVersion

4.6 Dependency Resolution

Dependency resolution is handled by the Gradle build tool, all dependencies are defined in the build.gradle file. Refer to the Gradle user guide for more information.

5 The Command Line

Grails 3.0’s command line system differs greatly from previous versions of Grails and features APIs for invoking Gradle for build related tasks, as well as performing code generation.

When you type:

grails <<command name>>

Grails searches the profile repository based on the profile of the current application. If the profile is for a web application then commands are read from the web profile and the base profile which it inherits from.

Since command behavior is profile specific the web profile may provide different behavior for the run-app command then say a profile for running batch applications.

When you type the following command:

grails run-app

It will first search the application, and then the profile for commands:

  • PROJECT_HOME/src/main/scripts/run-app.groovy

  • [profile]/commands/run-app.groovy

  • [profile]/commands/run-app.yml

To get a list of all commands and some help about the available commands type:

grails help

which outputs usage instructions and the list of commands Grails is aware of:

grails <<environment>>* <<target>> <<arguments>>*'

| Examples:
$ grails dev run-app
$ grails create-app books

| Available Commands (type grails help 'command-name' for more info):
| Command Name                          Command Description
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
clean                                   Cleans a Grails application's compiled sources
compile                                 Compiles a Grails application
...
Refer to the Command Line reference in the Quick Reference menu of the reference guide for more information about individual commands

Arguments

The grails command is a front to a gradle invocation, because of this there can be unexpected side-effects. For example, when executing grails -Dapp.foo=bar run-app the app.foo system property won’t be available to your application. This is because bootRun in your build.gradle configures the system properties. To make this work you can simply append all System.properties to bootRun in build.gradle like:

bootRun{
    systemProperties System.properties // Please note not to use '=', because this will override all configured systemProperties. This will append them.
}

Or if you only want to pass through a limited set, you can prefix your system properties using an arbitrary prefix and configure bootRun like:

bootRun{
    bootRun {
        systemProperties System.properties.inject([:]){acc,item-> item.key.startsWith('boot.')?acc << [(item.key.substring('boot.'.length())):item.value]:acc }
    }
}

In this example only system properties starting with boot. are passed through.

Application and JVM arguments should be specified in bootRun as well.

bootRun{
    bootRun {
        jvmArgs('-Dspring.output.ansi.enabled=always')
        args('--app.foo=bar','--app.bar=foo') // Override the `app.foo` and `app.bar` config options (`grailsApplication.config`)
    }
}

non-interactive mode

When you run a script manually and it prompts you for information, you can answer the questions and continue running the script. But when you run a script as part of an automated process, for example a continuous integration build server, there’s no way to "answer" the questions. So you can pass the \--non-interactive switch to the script command to tell Grails to accept the default answer for any questions, for example whether to install a missing plugin.

For example:

grails war --non-interactive

5.1 Interactive Mode

Interactive mode is a feature of the Grails command line which keeps the JVM running and allows for quicker execution of commands. To activate interactive mode type 'grails' at the command line and then use TAB completion to get a list of commands:

interactive output

If you need to open a file whilst within interactive mode you can use the open command which will TAB complete file paths:

interactive open cmd

Even better, the open command understands the logical aliases 'test-report' and 'dep-report', which will open the most recent test and dependency reports respectively. In other words, to open the test report in a browser simply execute open test-report. You can even open multiple files at once: open test-report test/unit/MyTests.groovy will open the HTML test report in your browser and the MyTests.groovy source file in your text editor.

TAB completion also works for class names after the create-* commands:

interactive complete class

If you need to run an external process whilst interactive mode is running you can do so by starting the command with a !:

interactive run external

Note that with ! (bang) commands, you get file path auto completion - ideal for external commands that operate on the file system such as 'ls', 'cat', 'git', etc.

To exit interactive mode enter the exit command. Note that if the Grails application has been run with run-app normally it will terminate when the interactive mode console exits because the JVM will be terminated. An exception to this would be if the application were running in forked mode which means the application is running in a different JVM. In that case the application will be left running after the interactive mode console terminates. If you want to exit interactive mode and stop an application that is running in forked mode, use the quit command. The quit command will stop the running application and then close interactive mode.

5.2 Creating Custom Scripts

You can create your own Command scripts by running the create-script command from the root of your project. For example the following command will create a script called src/main/scripts/hello-world.groovy:

grails create-script hello-world
In general Grails scripts should be used for scripting the Gradle based build system and code generation. Scripts cannot load application classes and in fact should not since Gradle is required to construct the application classpath.

See below for an example script that prints "Hello World":

description "Example description", "grails hello-world"

println "Hello World"

The description method is used to define the output seen by grails help and to aid users of the script. The following is a more complete example of providing a description taken from the generate-all command:

description( "Generates a controller that performs CRUD operations and the associated views" ) {
  usage "grails generate-all <<DOMAIN CLASS>>"
  flag name:'force', description:"Whether to overwrite existing files"
  argument name:'Domain Class', description:'The name of the domain class'
}

As you can see this description profiles usage instructions, a flag and an argument. This allows the command to be used as follows:

grails generate-all MyClass --force

Template Generation

Plugins and applications that need to define template generation tasks can do so using scripts. A example of this is the Scaffolding plugin which defines the generate-all and generate-controllers commands.

Every Grails script implements the TemplateRenderer interface which makes it trivial to render templates to the users project workspace.

The following is an example of the create-script command written in Groovy:

description( "Creates a Grails script" ) {
  usage "grails create-script <<SCRIPT NAME>>"
  argument name:'Script Name', description:"The name of the script to create"
  flag name:'force', description:"Whether to overwrite existing files"
}

def scriptName = args[0]
def model = model(scriptName)
def overwrite = flag('force') ? true : false

render  template: template('artifacts/Script.groovy'),
        destination: file("src/main/scripts/${model.lowerCaseName}.groovy"),
        model: model,
        overwrite: overwrite

If a script is defined in a plugin or profile, the template(String) method will search for the template in the application before using the template provided by your plugin or profile. This allows users of your plugin or profile to customize what gets generated.

It is common to provide an easy way to allow users to copy the templates from your plugin or profile. Here is one example on how the angular scaffolding copies templates.

templates("angular/**/*").each { Resource r ->
    String path = r.URL.toString().replaceAll(/^.*?META-INF/, "src/main")
    if (path.endsWith('/')) {
        mkdir(path)
    } else {
        File to = new File(path)
        SpringIOUtils.copy(r, to)
        println("Copied ${r.filename} to location ${to.canonicalPath}")
    }
}

The "model"

Executing the model method with a Class/String/File/Resource will return an instance of Model. The model contains several properties that can help you generate code.

Example:

def domain = model(com.foo.Bar)

domain.className == "FooBar"
domain.fullName == "com.foo.FooBar"
domain.packageName == "com.foo"
domain.packagePath == "com/foo"
domain.propertyName == "fooBar"
domain.lowerCaseName == "foo-bar"

In addition, an asMap method is available to turn all of the properties into a map to pass to the render method.

Working with files

All scripts have access to methods on the FileSystemInteraction class. It contains helpful methods to copy, delete, and create files.

5.3 Creating Custom Commands

You can create your own commands by running the create-command command from the root of your project. For example the following command will create a command called grails-app/commands/HelloWorldCommand:

grails create-command HelloWorld
Unlike scripts, commands cause the Grails environment to start and you have full access to the application context and the runtime.

Since Grails 3.2.0, commands have similar abilities as scripts in regards to retrieving arguments, template generation, file access, and model building.

If you created a command in a previous version of grails, you can update your command to have those abilities by changing which trait you are implementing.

Commands created in Grails 3.1.x or lower implement the ApplicationCommand trait by default which requires your command to implement the following method:

boolean handle(ExecutionContext executionContext)

Commands created in Grails 3.2.0 or higher implement the GrailsApplicationCommand trait by default which requires your command to implement the following method:

boolean handle()
Commands defined this way still have access to the execution context via a variable called "executionContext".

Custom commands can be executed using grails run-command:

grails run-command my-example

Commands can also be executed using the runCommand gradle task. Note that the gradle task uses camelCase:

gradle runCommand -Pargs="my-example"

If the grails server is a subproject (e.g., in a project created with the angular profile), the subproject command can still be invoked from the gradle wrapper in the parent project:

./gradlew server:runCommand -Pargs="my-example"

5.4 Re-using Grails scripts

Grails ships with a lot of command line functionality out of the box that you may find useful in your own scripts (See the command line reference in the reference guide for info on all the commands).

Any script you create can invoke another Grails script simply by invoking a method:

testApp()

The above will invoke the test-app command. You can also pass arguments using the method arguments:

testApp('--debug-jvm')

Invoking Gradle

Instead of invoking another Grails CLI command you can invoke Gradle directory using the gradle property.

gradle.compileGroovy()

Invoking Ant

You can also invoke Ant tasks from scripts which can help if you need to writing code generation and automation tasks:

ant.mkdir(dir:"path")

5.5 Building with Gradle

Since Grails 3.1 the Gradle Build System is used for build related tasks such as compilation, runnings tests and producing binary distributions of your project. It is recommended to use Gradle 2.2 or above with Grails 3.1 (and higher).

The build is defined by the build.gradle file which specifies the version of your project, the dependencies of the project and the repositories where to find those dependencies (amongst other things).

When you invoke the grails command the version of Gradle that ships with Grails 3.1 (currently 2.9) is invoked by the grails process via the Gradle Tooling API:

# Equivalent to 'gradle classes'
$ grails compile

You can invoke Gradle directly using the gradle command and use your own local version of Gradle, however you will need Gradle 2.2 or above to work with Grails 3.0 (and higher):

$ gradle assemble

5.5.1 Defining Dependencies with Gradle

Dependencies for your project are defined in the dependencies block. In general you can follow the Gradle documentation on dependency management to understand how to configure additional dependencies.

The default dependencies for the "web" profile can be seen below:

dependencies {
  compile 'org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-logging'
  compile('org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-actuator')
  compile 'org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-autoconfigure'
  compile 'org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-tomcat'
  compile 'org.grails:grails-dependencies'
  compile 'org.grails:grails-web-boot'

  compile 'org.grails.plugins:hibernate'
  compile 'org.grails.plugins:cache'
  compile 'org.hibernate:hibernate-ehcache'

  runtime 'org.grails.plugins:asset-pipeline'
  runtime 'org.grails.plugins:scaffolding'

  testCompile "org.grails:grails-gorm-testing-support"
  testCompile "org.grails:grails-web-testing-support"
  testCompile 'org.grails.plugins:geb'

  // Note: It is recommended to update to a more robust driver (Chrome, Firefox etc.)
  testRuntime 'org.seleniumhq.selenium:selenium-htmlunit-driver:2.44.0'

  console 'org.grails:grails-console'
}

Note that version numbers are not present in the majority of the dependencies. This is thanks to the dependency management plugin which configures a Maven BOM that defines the default dependency versions for certain commonly used dependencies and plugins:

dependencyManagement {
    imports {
        mavenBom 'org.grails:grails-bom:' + grailsVersion
    }
    applyMavenExclusions false
}

5.5.2 Working with Gradle Tasks

As mentioned previously the grails command uses an embedded version of Gradle and certain Grails commands that existed in previous versions of Grails map onto their Gradle equivalents. The following table shows which Grails command invoke which Gradle task:

Grails Command Gradle Task

clean

clean

compile

classes

package

assemble

run-app

bootRun

test-app

check

test-app --unit

test

test-app --integration

integrationTest

war

assemble

You can invoke any of these Grails commands using their Gradle equivalents if you prefer:

$ gradle test

Note however that you will need to use a version of Gradle compatible with Grails 3.1 (Gradle 2.2 or above). If you wish to invoke a Gradle task using the version of Gradle used by Grails you can do so with the grails command:

$ grails gradle compileGroovy

However, it is recommended you do this via interactive mode, as it greatly speeds up execution and provides TAB completion for the available Gradle tasks:

$ grails
| Enter a command name to run. Use TAB for completion:
 grails> gradle compileGroovy
 ...

To find out what Gradle tasks are available without using interactive mode TAB completion you can use the Gradle tasks task:

gradle tasks

5.5.3 Grails plugins for Gradle

When you create a new project with the create-app command, a default build.gradle is created. The default build.gradle configures the build with a set of Gradle plugins that allow Gradle to build the Grails project:

apply plugin:"war"
apply plugin:"org.grails.grails-web"
apply plugin:"org.grails.grails-gsp"
apply plugin:"asset-pipeline"

The default plugins are as follows:

  • war - The WAR plugin changes the packaging so that Gradle creates as WAR file from your application. You can comment out this plugin if you wish to create only a runnable JAR file for standalone deployment.

  • asset-pipeline - The asset pipeline plugin enables the compilation of static assets (JavaScript, CSS etc.)

Many of these are built in plugins provided by Gradle or third party plugins. The Gradle plugins that Grails provides are as follows:

  • org.grails.grails-core - The primary Grails plugin for Gradle, included by all other plugins and designed to operate with all profiles.

  • org.grails.grails-gsp - The Grails GSP plugin adds precompilation of GSP files for production deployments.

  • org.grails.grails-doc - A plugin for Gradle for using Grails 2.0’s documentation engine.

  • org.grails.grails-plugin - A plugin for Gradle for building Grails plugins.

  • org.grails.grails-plugin-publish - A plugin for publishing Grails plugins to the central repository.

  • org.grails.grails-profile - A plugin for use when creating Grails Profiles.

  • org.grails.grails-profile-publish - A plugin for publishing Grails profiles to the central repository.

  • org.grails.grails-web - The Grails Web gradle plugin configures Gradle to understand the Grails conventions and directory structure.

6 Application Profiles

When you create a Grails application with the create-app command by default the "web" profile is used:

grails create-app myapp

You can specify a different profile with the profile argument:

grails create-app myapp --profile=rest-api

Profiles encapsulate the project commands, templates and plugins that are designed to work for a given profile. The source for the profiles can be found on Github, whilst the profiles themselves are published as JAR files to the Grails central repository.

To find out what profiles are available use the list-profiles command:

$ grails list-profiles

For more information on a particular profile use the profile-info command:

$ grails profile-info rest-api
Commands such as profile-info or list-profiles are not available when you invoke the Grails CLI inside a grails project.

Profile Repositories

By default Grails will resolve profiles from the Grails central repository. However, you can override what repositories will be searched by specifying repositories in the USER_HOME/.grails/settings.groovy file.

If you want profiles to be resolved with a custom repository in addition to the Grails central repository, you must specify Grails central in the file as well:

grails {
  profiles {
    repositories {
      myRepo {
        url = "http://foo.com/repo"
        snapshotsEnabled = true
      }
      grailsCentral {
        url = "https://repo.grails.org/grails/core"
        snapshotsEnabled = true
      }
    }
  }
}
Grails uses Aether to resolve profiles, as a Gradle instance is not yet available when the create-app command is executed. This means that you can also define repositories and more advanced configuration (proxies, authentication etc.) in your USER_HOME/.m2/settings.xml file if you wish.

It is also possible to store simple credentials for profile repositories directly in the USER_HOME/.grails/settings.groovy file.

grails {
  profiles {
    repositories {
      myRepo {
        url = "http://foo.com/repo"
        snapshotsEnabled = true
        username = "user"
        password = "pass"
      }
      ...
    }
  }
}

Profile Defaults

To create an application that uses a custom profile, you must specify the full artifact.

$ grails create-app myapp --profile=com.mycompany.grails.profiles:myprofile:1.0.0

To make this process easier, you can define defaults for a given profile in the USER_HOME/.grails/settings.groovy file.

grails {
  profiles {
    myprofile {
      groupId = "com.mycompany.grails.profiles"
      version = "1.0.0"
    }
    repositories {
      ...
    }
  }
}

With the default values specified, the command to create an application using that profile becomes:

$ grails create-app myapp --profile=myprofile

6.1 Creating Profiles

The idea behind creating a new profile is that you can setup a default set of commands and plugins that are tailored to a particular technology or organisation.

To create a new profile you can use the create-profile command which will create a new empty profile that extends the base profile:

$ grails create-profile mycompany

The above command will create a new profile in the "mycompany" directory where the command is executed. If you start interactive mode within the directory you will get a set of commands for creating profiles:

$ cd mycompany
$ grails
| Enter a command name to run. Use TAB for completion:
grails>

create-command      create-creator-command      create-feature      create-generator-command    create-gradle-command   create-template

The commands are as follows:

  • create-command - creates a new command that will be available from the Grails CLI when the profile is used

  • create-creator-command - creates a command available to the CLI that renders a template (Example: create-controller)

  • create-generator-command - creates a command available to the CLI that renders a template based on a domain class (Example: generate-controller)

  • create-feature - creates a feature that can be used with this profile

  • create-gradle-command - creates a CLI command that can invoke gradle

  • create-template - creates a template that can be rendered by a command

To customize the dependencies for your profile you can specify additional dependencies in profile.yml.

Below is an example profile.yml file:

features:
    defaults:
        - hibernate
        - asset-pipeline
build:
    plugins:
        - org.grails.grails-web
    excludes:
        - org.grails.grails-core
dependencies:
    - scope: compile
      coords: "org.mycompany:myplugin:1.0.1"
    - scope: testCompile
      coords: org.spockframework:spock-core
      excludes:
        - group: org.codehaus.groovy
          module: groovy-all

With the above configuration in place you can publish the profile to your local repository with gradle install:

$ gradle install

Your profile is now usable with the create-app command:

$ grails create-app myapp --profile mycompany

With the above command the application will be created with the "mycompany" profile which includes an additional dependency on the "myplugin" plugin and also includes the "hibernate" and "asset-pipeline" features (more on features later).

Note that if you customize the dependency coordinates of the profile (group, version etc.) then you may need to use the fully qualified coordinates to create an application:

$ grails create-app myapp --profile com.mycompany:mycompany:1.0.1

6.2 Profile Inheritance

One profile can extend one or many different parent profiles. To define profile inheritance you can modify the build.gradle of a profile and define the profile dependences. For example typically you want to extend the base profile:

dependencies {
    runtime "org.grails.profiles:base:$baseProfileVersion"
}

By inheriting from a parent profile you get the following benefits:

  • When the create-app command is executed the parent profile’s skeleton is copied first

  • Dependencies and build.gradle is merged from the parent(s)

  • The application.yml file is merged from the parent(s)

  • CLI commands from the parent profile are inherited

  • Features from the parent profile are inherited

To define the order of inheritance ensure that your dependencies are declared in the correct order. For example:

dependencies {
    runtime "org.grails.profiles:plugin:$baseProfileVersion"
    runtime "org.grails.profiles:web:$baseProfileVersion"
}

In the above snippet the skeleton from the "plugin" profile is copied first, followed by the "web" profile. In addition, the "web" profile overrides commands from the "plugin" profile, whilst if the dependency order was reversed the "plugin" profile would override the "web" profile.

6.3 Publishing Profiles

Publishing Profiles to the Grails Central Repository

Any profile created with the create-profile command already comes configured with a grails-profile-publish plugin defined in build.gradle:

apply plugin: "org.grails.grails-profile-publish"

To publish a profile using this plugin to the Grails central repository first upload the source to Github (closed source profiles will not be accepted). Then register for an account on Bintray and configure your keys as follows in the profile’s build.gradle file:

grailsPublish {
  user = 'YOUR USERNAME'
  key = 'YOUR KEY'
  githubSlug = 'your-repo/your-profile'
  license = 'Apache-2.0'
}
The githubSlug argument should point to the path to your Github repository. For example if your repository is located at https://github.com/foo/bar then your githubSlug is foo/bar

With this in place you can run gradle publishProfile to publish your profile:

$ gradle publishProfile

The profile will be uploaded to Bintray. You can then go the Grails profiles repository and request to have your profile included by clicking "Include My Package" button on Bintray’s interface (you must be logged in to see this).

Publishing Profiles to an Internal Repository

The aforementioned grails-profile-publish plugin configures Gradle’s Maven Publish plugin. In order to publish to an internal repository all you need to do is define the repository in build.gradle. For example:

publishing {
    repositories {
        maven {
            credentials {
                username "foo"
                password "bar"
            }

            url "http://foo.com/repo"
        }
    }
}

Once configured you can publish your plugin with gradle publish:

$ gradle publish

6.4 Understanding Profiles

A profile is a simple directory that contains a profile.yml file and directories containing the "commands", "skeleton" and "templates" defined by the profile. Example:

/web
    commands/
        create-controller.yml
        run-app.groovy
        ...
    features/
        asset-pipeline/
            skeleton
            feature.yml
    skeleton/
        grails-app/
            controllers/
            ...
        build.gradle
    templates/
        artifacts/
            Controller.groovy
    profile.yml

The above example is a snippet of structure of the 'web' profile. The profile.yml file is used to describe the profile and control how the build is configured.

Understanding the profile.yml descriptor

The profile.yml can contain the following child elements.

1) repositories

A list of Maven repositories to include in the generated build. Example:

repositories:
    - "https://repo.grails.org/grails/core"

2) build.repositories

A list of Maven repositories to include in the buildscript section of the generated build. Example:

build:
    repositories:
        - "https://repo.grails.org/grails/core"

3) build.plugins

A list of Gradle plugins to configure in the generated build. Example:

build:
    plugins:
        - eclipse
        - idea
        - org.grails.grails-core

4) build.excludes

A list of Gradle plugins to exclude from being inherited from the parent profile:

build:
    excludes:
        - org.grails.grails-core

5) dependencies

A map of scopes and dependencies to configure. The excludes scope can be used to exclude from the parent profile. Example:

dependencies:
    - scope: excludes
      coords: "org.grails:hibernate:*"
    - scope: build
      coords: "org.grails:grails-gradle-plugin:$grailsVersion"
    - scope: compile
      coords: "org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-logging"
    - scope: compile
      coords: "org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-autoconfigure"
Excluding Transitive Dependencies

To exclude transitive dependencies, define excludes key with a List of transitive dependencies Map of the dependency group, module, classifier, and extension as:

dependencies:
    - scope: testCompile
      coords: org.spockframework:spock-core
      excludes:
        - group: org.codehaus.groovy
          module: groovy-all

6) features.defaults

A default list of features to use if no explicit features are specified.

features:
    defaults:
        - hibernate
        - asset-pipeline

7) skeleton.excludes

A list of files to exclude from parent profile’s skeletons (supports wildcards).

skeleton:
    excludes:
        - gradlew
        - gradlew.bat
        - gradle/

8) skeleton.parent.target

The target folder that parent profile’s skeleton should be copied into. This can be used to create multi-project builds.

skeleton:
    parent:
        target: app

9) skeleton.binaryExtensions

Which file extensions should be copied from the profile as binary. Inherited and combined from parent profiles.

skeleton:
    binaryExtensions: [exe, zip]

10) skeleton.executable

File patterns that should be marked as executable in the resulting application. Inherited and combined from parent profiles. The patterns are parsed with Ant.

skeleton:
    executable:
      - "**/gradlew*"
      - "**/grailsw*"

11) instructions

Text to be displayed to the user after the application is created

instructions: Here are some instructions

What happens when a profile is used?

When the create-app command runs it takes the skeleton of the parent profiles and copies the skeletons into a new project structure.

The build.gradle file is generated is result of obtaining all of the dependency information defined in the profile.yml files and produces the required dependencies.

The command will also merge any build.gradle files defined within a profile and its parent profiles.

The grails-app/conf/application.yml file is also merged into a single YAML file taking into account the profile and all of the parent profiles.

6.5 Creating Profile Commands

A profile can define new commands that apply only to that profile using YAML or Groovy scripts. Below is an example of the create-controller command defined in YAML:

description:
    - Creates a controller
    - usage: 'create-controller <<controller name>>'
    - completer: org.grails.cli.interactive.completers.DomainClassCompleter
    - argument: "Controller Name"
      description: "The name of the controller"
steps:
 - command: render
   template: templates/artifacts/Controller.groovy
   destination: grails-app/controllers/`artifact.package.path`/`artifact.name`Controller.groovy
 - command: render
   template: templates/testing/Controller.groovy
   destination: src/test/groovy/`artifact.package.path`/`artifact.name`ControllerSpec.groovy
 - command: mkdir
   location: grails-app/views/`artifact.propertyName`

Commands defined in YAML must define one or many steps. Each step is a command in itself. The available step types are:

  • render - To render a template to a given destination (as seen in the previous example)

  • mkdir - To make a directory specified by the location parameter

  • execute - To execute a command specified by the class parameter. Must be a class that implements the Command interface.

  • gradle - To execute one or many Gradle tasks specified by the tasks parameter.

For example to invoke a Gradle task, you can define the following YAML:

description: Creates a WAR file for deployment to a container (like Tomcat)
minArguments: 0
usage: |
 war
steps:
 - command: gradle
   tasks:
     - war

If you need more flexibility than what the declarative YAML approach provides you can create Groovy script commands. Each Command script is extends from the GroovyScriptCommand class and hence has all of the methods of that class available to it.

The following is an example of the create-script command written in Groovy:

description( "Creates a Grails script" ) {
  usage "grails create-script <<SCRIPT NAME>>"
  argument name:'Script Name', description:"The name of the script to create"
  flag name:'force', description:"Whether to overwrite existing files"
}

def scriptName = args[0]
def model = model(scriptName)
def overwrite = flag('force') ? true : false

render  template: template('artifacts/Script.groovy'),
        destination: file("src/main/scripts/${model.lowerCaseName}.groovy"),
        model: model,
        overwrite: overwrite

For more information on creating CLI commands see the section on creating custom scripts in the Command Line section of the user guide.

6.6 Creating Profile Features

A Profile feature is a shareable set of templates and dependencies that may span multiple profiles. Typically you create a base profile that has multiple features and child profiles that inherit from the parent and hence can use the features available from the parent.

To create a feature use the create-feature command from the root directory of your profile:

$ grails create-feature myfeature

This will create a myfeature/feature.yml file that looks like the following:

description: Description of the feature
# customize versions here
# dependencies:
#   - scope: compile
#     coords: "org.grails.plugins:myplugin2:1.0"
#

As a more concrete example. The following is the feature.yml file from the "asset-pipeline" feature:

description: Adds Asset Pipeline to a Grails project
build:
    plugins:
        - asset-pipeline
dependencies:
    - scope: build
      coords: 'com.bertramlabs.plugins:asset-pipeline-gradle:2.5.0'
    - scope: runtime
      coords: "org.grails.plugins:asset-pipeline"

The structure of a feature is as follows:

FEATURE_DIR
    feature.yml
    skeleton/
        grails-app/
            conf/
                application.yml
        build.gradle

The contents of the skeleton get copied into the application tree, whilst the application.yml and build.gradle get merged with their respective counterparts in the profile by used.

With the feature.yml you can define additional dependencies. This allows users to create applications with optional features. For example:

$ grails create-app myapp --profile myprofile --features myfeature,hibernate

The above example will create a new application using your new feature and the "hibernate" feature.

7 Object Relational Mapping (GORM)

Domain classes are core to any business application. They hold state about business processes and hopefully also implement behavior. They are linked together through relationships; one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many.

GORM is Grails' object relational mapping (ORM) implementation. Under the hood it uses Hibernate (a very popular and flexible open source ORM solution) and thanks to the dynamic nature of Groovy with its static and dynamic typing, along with the convention of Grails, there is far less configuration involved in creating Grails domain classes.

You can also write Grails domain classes in Java. See the section on Hibernate Integration for how to write domain classes in Java but still use dynamic persistent methods. Below is a preview of GORM in action:

def book = Book.findByTitle("Groovy in Action")

book
  .addToAuthors(name:"Dierk Koenig")
  .addToAuthors(name:"Guillaume LaForge")
  .save()

7.1 Quick Start Guide

A domain class can be created with the create-domain-class command:

grails create-domain-class helloworld.Person
If no package is specified with the create-domain-class script, Grails automatically uses the application name as the package name.

This will create a class at the location grails-app/domain/helloworld/Person.groovy such as the one below:

package helloworld

class Person {
}
If you have the dbCreate property set to "update", "create" or "create-drop" on your DataSource, Grails will automatically generate/modify the database tables for you.

You can customize the class by adding properties:

class Person {
    String name
    Integer age
    Date lastVisit
}

Once you have a domain class try and manipulate it with the shell or console by typing:

grails console

This loads an interactive GUI where you can run Groovy commands with access to the Spring ApplicationContext, GORM, etc.

7.1.1 Basic CRUD

Try performing some basic CRUD (Create/Read/Update/Delete) operations.

Create

To create a domain class use Map constructor to set its properties and call save:

def p = new Person(name: "Fred", age: 40, lastVisit: new Date())
p.save()

The save method will persist your class to the database using the underlying Hibernate ORM layer.

Read

Grails transparently adds an implicit id property to your domain class which you can use for retrieval:

def p = Person.get(1)
assert 1 == p.id

This uses the get method that expects a database identifier to read the Person object back from the database. You can also load an object in a read-only state by using the read method:

def p = Person.read(1)

In this case the underlying Hibernate engine will not do any dirty checking and the object will not be persisted. Note that if you explicitly call the save method then the object is placed back into a read-write state.

In addition, you can also load a proxy for an instance by using the load method:

def p = Person.load(1)

This incurs no database access until a method other than getId() is called. Hibernate then initializes the proxied instance, or throws an exception if no record is found for the specified id.

Update

To update an instance, change some properties and then call save again:

def p = Person.get(1)
p.name = "Bob"
p.save()

Delete

To delete an instance use the delete method:

def p = Person.get(1)
p.delete()

7.2 Further Reading on GORM

For more information on using GORM see the dedicated documentation for the GORM project.

8 The Web Layer

8.1 Controllers

A controller handles requests and creates or prepares the response. A controller can generate the response directly or delegate to a view. To create a controller, simply create a class whose name ends with Controller in the grails-app/controllers directory (in a subdirectory if it’s in a package).

The default URL Mapping configuration ensures that the first part of your controller name is mapped to a URI and each action defined within your controller maps to URIs within the controller name URI.

8.1.1 Understanding Controllers and Actions

Creating a controller

Controllers can be created with the create-controller or generate-controller command. For example try running the following command from the root of a Grails project:

grails create-controller book

The command will create a controller at the location grails-app/controllers/myapp/BookController.groovy:

package myapp

class BookController {

    def index() { }
}

where "myapp" will be the name of your application, the default package name if one isn’t specified.

BookController by default maps to the /book URI (relative to your application root).

The create-controller and generate-controller commands are just for convenience and you can just as easily create controllers using your favorite text editor or IDE

Creating Actions

A controller can have multiple public action methods; each one maps to a URI:

class BookController {

    def list() {

        // do controller logic
        // create model

        return model
    }
}

This example maps to the /book/list URI by default thanks to the property being named list.

The Default Action

A controller has the concept of a default URI that maps to the root URI of the controller, for example /book for BookController. The action that is called when the default URI is requested is dictated by the following rules:

  • If there is only one action, it’s the default

  • If you have an action named index, it’s the default

  • Alternatively you can set it explicitly with the defaultAction property:

static defaultAction = "list"

8.1.2 Controllers and Scopes

Available Scopes

Scopes are hash-like objects where you can store variables. The following scopes are available to controllers:

  • servletContext - Also known as application scope, this scope lets you share state across the entire web application. The servletContext is an instance of ServletContext

  • session - The session allows associating state with a given user and typically uses cookies to associate a session with a client. The session object is an instance of HttpSession

  • request - The request object allows the storage of objects for the current request only. The request object is an instance of HttpServletRequest

  • params - Mutable map of incoming request query string or POST parameters

  • flash - See below

Accessing Scopes

Scopes can be accessed using the variable names above in combination with Groovy’s array index operator, even on classes provided by the Servlet API such as the HttpServletRequest:

class BookController {
    def find() {
        def findBy = params["findBy"]
        def appContext = request["foo"]
        def loggedUser = session["logged_user"]
    }
}

You can also access values within scopes using the de-reference operator, making the syntax even more clear:

class BookController {
    def find() {
        def findBy = params.findBy
        def appContext = request.foo
        def loggedUser = session.logged_user
    }
}

This is one of the ways that Grails unifies access to the different scopes.

Using Flash Scope

Grails supports the concept of flash scope as a temporary store to make attributes available for this request and the next request only. Afterwards the attributes are cleared. This is useful for setting a message directly before redirecting, for example:

def delete() {
    def b = Book.get(params.id)
    if (!b) {
        flash.message = "User not found for id ${params.id}"
        redirect(action:list)
    }
    ... // remaining code
}

When the delete action is requested, the message value will be in scope and can be used to display an information message. It will be removed from the flash scope after this second request.

Note that the attribute name can be anything you want, and the values are often strings used to display messages, but can be any object type.

Scoped Controllers

Newly created applications have the grails.controllers.defaultScope property set to a value of "singleton" in application.yml. You may change this value to any of the supported scopes listed below. If the property is not assigned a value at all, controllers will default to "prototype" scope.

Supported controller scopes are:

  • prototype (default) - A new controller will be created for each request (recommended for actions as Closure properties)

  • session - One controller is created for the scope of a user session

  • singleton - Only one instance of the controller ever exists (recommended for actions as methods)

To enable one of the scopes, add a static scope property to your class with one of the valid scope values listed above, for example

static scope = "singleton"

You can define the default strategy in application.yml with the grails.controllers.defaultScope key, for example:

grails:
    controllers:
        defaultScope: singleton
Use scoped controllers wisely. For instance, we don’t recommend having any properties in a singleton-scoped controller since they will be shared for all requests.

8.1.3 Models and Views

Returning the Model

A model is a Map that the view uses when rendering. The keys within that Map correspond to variable names accessible by the view. There are a couple of ways to return a model. First, you can explicitly return a Map instance:

def show() {
    [book: Book.get(params.id)]
}
The above does not reflect what you should use with the scaffolding views - see the scaffolding section for more details.

A more advanced approach is to return an instance of the Spring ModelAndView class:

import org.springframework.web.servlet.ModelAndView

def index() {
    // get some books just for the index page, perhaps your favorites
    def favoriteBooks = ...

    // forward to the list view to show them
    return new ModelAndView("/book/list", [ bookList : favoriteBooks ])
}

One thing to bear in mind is that certain variable names can not be used in your model:

  • attributes

  • application

Currently, no error will be reported if you do use them, but this will hopefully change in a future version of Grails.

Selecting the View

In both of the previous two examples there was no code that specified which view to render. So how does Grails know which one to pick? The answer lies in the conventions. Grails will look for a view at the location grails-app/views/book/show.gsp for this show action:

class BookController {
    def show() {
         [book: Book.get(params.id)]
    }
}

To render a different view, use the render method:

def show() {
    def map = [book: Book.get(params.id)]
    render(view: "display", model: map)
}

In this case Grails will attempt to render a view at the location grails-app/views/book/display.gsp. Notice that Grails automatically qualifies the view location with the book directory of the grails-app/views directory. This is convenient, but to access shared views, you use an absolute path instead of a relative one:

def show() {
    def map = [book: Book.get(params.id)]
    render(view: "/shared/display", model: map)
}

In this case Grails will attempt to render a view at the location grails-app/views/shared/display.gsp.

Grails also supports JSPs as views, so if a GSP isn’t found in the expected location but a JSP is, it will be used instead.

Selecting Views For Namespaced Controllers

If a controller defines a namespace for itself with the namespace property that will affect the root directory in which Grails will look for views which are specified with a relative path. The default root directory for views rendered by a namespaced controller is grails-app/views/<namespace name>/<controller name>/. If the view is not found in the namespaced directory then Grails will fallback to looking for the view in the non-namespaced directory.

See the example below.

class ReportingController {
    static namespace = 'business'

    def humanResources() {
        // This will render grails-app/views/business/reporting/humanResources.gsp
        // if it exists.

        // If grails-app/views/business/reporting/humanResources.gsp does not
        // exist the fallback will be grails-app/views/reporting/humanResources.gsp.

        // The namespaced GSP will take precedence over the non-namespaced GSP.

        [numberOfEmployees: 9]
    }


    def accountsReceivable() {
        // This will render grails-app/views/business/reporting/numberCrunch.gsp
        // if it exists.

        // If grails-app/views/business/reporting/numberCrunch.gsp does not
        // exist the fallback will be grails-app/views/reporting/numberCrunch.gsp.

        // The namespaced GSP will take precedence over the non-namespaced GSP.

        render view: 'numberCrunch', model: [numberOfEmployees: 13]
    }
}

Rendering a Response

Sometimes it’s easier (for example with Ajax applications) to render snippets of text or code to the response directly from the controller. For this, the highly flexible render method can be used:

render "Hello World!"

The above code writes the text "Hello World!" to the response. Other examples include:

// write some markup
render {
   for (b in books) {
      div(id: b.id, b.title)
   }
}
// render a specific view
render(view: 'show')
// render a template for each item in a collection
render(template: 'book_template', collection: Book.list())
// render some text with encoding and content type
render(text: "<xml>some xml</xml>", contentType: "text/xml", encoding: "UTF-8")

If you plan on using Groovy’s MarkupBuilder to generate HTML for use with the render method be careful of naming clashes between HTML elements and Grails tags, for example:

import groovy.xml.MarkupBuilder
...
def login() {
    def writer = new StringWriter()
    def builder = new MarkupBuilder(writer)
    builder.html {
        head {
            title 'Log in'
        }
        body {
            h1 'Hello'
            form {
            }
        }
    }

    def html = writer.toString()
    render html
}

This will actually call the form tag (which will return some text that will be ignored by the MarkupBuilder). To correctly output a <form> element, use the following:

def login() {
    // ...
    body {
        h1 'Hello'
        builder.form {
        }
    }
    // ...
}

8.1.4 Redirects and Chaining

Redirects

Actions can be redirected using the redirect controller method:

class OverviewController {

    def login() {}

    def find() {
        if (!session.user)
            redirect(action: 'login')
            return
        }
        ...
    }
}

Internally the redirect method uses the HttpServletResponse object’s sendRedirect method.

The redirect method expects one of:

  • The name of an action (and controller name if the redirect isn’t to an action in the current controller):

// Also redirects to the index action in the home controller
redirect(controller: 'home', action: 'index')
  • A URI for a resource relative the application context path:

// Redirect to an explicit URI
redirect(uri: "/login.html")
  • Or a full URL:

// Redirect to a URL
redirect(url: "http://grails.org")
// Redirect to the domain instance
Book book = ... // obtain a domain instance
redirect book

In the above example Grails will construct a link using the domain class id (if present).

Parameters can optionally be passed from one action to the next using the params argument of the method:

redirect(action: 'myaction', params: [myparam: "myvalue"])

These parameters are made available through the params dynamic property that accesses request parameters. If a parameter is specified with the same name as a request parameter, the request parameter is overridden and the controller parameter is used.

Since the params object is a Map, you can use it to pass the current request parameters from one action to the next:

redirect(action: "next", params: params)

Finally, you can also include a fragment in the target URI:

redirect(controller: "test", action: "show", fragment: "profile")

which will (depending on the URL mappings) redirect to something like "/myapp/test/show#profile".

Chaining

Actions can also be chained. Chaining allows the model to be retained from one action to the next. For example calling the first action in this action:

class ExampleChainController {

    def first() {
        chain(action: second, model: [one: 1])
    }

    def second () {
        chain(action: third, model: [two: 2])
    }

    def third() {
        [three: 3])
    }
}

results in the model:

[one: 1, two: 2, three: 3]

The model can be accessed in subsequent controller actions in the chain using the chainModel map. This dynamic property only exists in actions following the call to the chain method:

class ChainController {

    def nextInChain() {
        def model = chainModel.myModel
        ...
    }
}

Like the redirect method you can also pass parameters to the chain method:

chain(action: "action1", model: [one: 1], params: [myparam: "param1"])
The chain method uses the HTTP session and hence should only be used if your application is stateful.

8.1.5 Data Binding

Data binding is the act of "binding" incoming request parameters onto the properties of an object or an entire graph of objects. Data binding should deal with all necessary type conversion since request parameters, which are typically delivered by a form submission, are always strings whilst the properties of a Groovy or Java object may well not be.

Map Based Binding

The data binder is capable of converting and assigning values in a Map to properties of an object. The binder will associate entries in the Map to properties of the object using the keys in the Map that have values which correspond to property names on the object. The following code demonstrates the basics:

grails-app/domain/Person.groovy
class Person {
    String firstName
    String lastName
    Integer age
}
def bindingMap = [firstName: 'Peter', lastName: 'Gabriel', age: 63]

def person = new Person(bindingMap)

assert person.firstName == 'Peter'
assert person.lastName == 'Gabriel'
assert person.age == 63

To update properties of a domain object you may assign a Map to the properties property of the domain class:

def bindingMap = [firstName: 'Peter', lastName: 'Gabriel', age: 63]

def person = Person.get(someId)
person.properties = bindingMap

assert person.firstName == 'Peter'
assert person.lastName == 'Gabriel'
assert person.age == 63

The binder can populate a full graph of objects using Maps of Maps.

class Person {
    String firstName
    String lastName
    Integer age
    Address homeAddress
}

class Address {
    String county
    String country
}
def bindingMap = [firstName: 'Peter', lastName: 'Gabriel', age: 63, homeAddress: [county: 'Surrey', country: 'England'] ]

def person = new Person(bindingMap)

assert person.firstName == 'Peter'
assert person.lastName == 'Gabriel'
assert person.age == 63
assert person.homeAddress.county == 'Surrey'
assert person.homeAddress.country == 'England'

Binding To Collections And Maps

The data binder can populate and update Collections and Maps. The following code shows a simple example of populating a List of objects in a domain class:

class Band {
    String name
    static hasMany = [albums: Album]
    List albums
}

class Album {
    String title
    Integer numberOfTracks
}
def bindingMap = [name: 'Genesis',
                  'albums[0]': [title: 'Foxtrot', numberOfTracks: 6],
                  'albums[1]': [title: 'Nursery Cryme', numberOfTracks: 7]]

def band = new Band(bindingMap)

assert band.name == 'Genesis'
assert band.albums.size() == 2
assert band.albums[0].title == 'Foxtrot'
assert band.albums[0].numberOfTracks == 6
assert band.albums[1].title == 'Nursery Cryme'
assert band.albums[1].numberOfTracks == 7

That code would work in the same way if albums were an array instead of a List.

Note that when binding to a Set the structure of the Map being bound to the Set is the same as that of a Map being bound to a List but since a Set is unordered, the indexes don’t necessarily correspond to the order of elements in the Set. In the code example above, if albums were a Set instead of a List, the bindingMap could look exactly the same but 'Foxtrot' might be the first album in the Set or it might be the second. When updating existing elements in a Set the Map being assigned to the Set must have id elements in it which represent the element in the Set being updated, as in the following example:

/*
 * The value of the indexes 0 and 1 in albums[0] and albums[1] are arbitrary
 * values that can be anything as long as they are unique within the Map.
 * They do not correspond to the order of elements in albums because albums
 * is a Set.
 */
def bindingMap = ['albums[0]': [id: 9, title: 'The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway']
                  'albums[1]': [id: 4, title: 'Selling England By The Pound']]

def band = Band.get(someBandId)

/*
 * This will find the Album in albums that has an id of 9 and will set its title
 * to 'The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway' and will find the Album in albums that has
 * an id of 4 and set its title to 'Selling England By The Pound'.  In both
 * cases if the Album cannot be found in albums then the album will be retrieved
 * from the database by id, the Album will be added to albums and will be updated
 * with the values described above.  If a Album with the specified id cannot be
 * found in the database, then a binding error will be created and associated
 * with the band object.  More on binding errors later.
 */
band.properties = bindingMap

When binding to a Map the structure of the binding Map is the same as the structure of a Map used for binding to a List or a Set and the index inside of square brackets corresponds to the key in the Map being bound to. See the following code:

class Album {
    String title
    static hasMany = [players: Player]
    Map players
}

class Player {
    String name
}
def bindingMap = [title: 'The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway',
                  'players[guitar]': [name: 'Steve Hackett'],
                  'players[vocals]': [name: 'Peter Gabriel'],
                  'players[keyboards]': [name: 'Tony Banks']]

def album = new Album(bindingMap)

assert album.title == 'The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway'
assert album.players.size() == 3
assert album.players.guitar.name == 'Steve Hackett'
assert album.players.vocals.name == 'Peter Gabriel'
assert album.players.keyboards.name == 'Tony Banks'

When updating an existing Map, if the key specified in the binding Map does not exist in the Map being bound to then a new value will be created and added to the Map with the specified key as in the following example:

def bindingMap = [title: 'The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway',
                  'players[guitar]': [name: 'Steve Hackett'],
                  'players[vocals]': [name: 'Peter Gabriel'],
                  'players[keyboards]': [name: 'Tony Banks']]

def album = new Album(bindingMap)

assert album.title == 'The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway'
assert album.players.size() == 3
assert album.players.guitar.name == 'Steve Hackett'
assert album.players.vocals.name  == 'Peter Gabriel'
assert album.players.keyboards.name  == 'Tony Banks'

def updatedBindingMap = ['players[drums]': [name: 'Phil Collins'],
                         'players[keyboards]': [name: 'Anthony George Banks']]

album.properties = updatedBindingMap

assert album.title == 'The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway'
assert album.players.size() == 4
assert album.players.guitar.name == 'Steve Hackett'
assert album.players.vocals.name == 'Peter Gabriel'
assert album.players.keyboards.name == 'Anthony George Banks'
assert album.players.drums.name == 'Phil Collins'

Binding Request Data to the Model

The params object that is available in a controller has special behavior that helps convert dotted request parameter names into nested Maps that the data binder can work with. For example, if a request includes request parameters named person.homeAddress.country and person.homeAddress.city with values 'USA' and 'St. Louis' respectively, params would include entries like these:

[person: [homeAddress: [country: 'USA', city: 'St. Louis']]]

There are two ways to bind request parameters onto the properties of a domain class. The first involves using a domain classes' Map constructor:

def save() {
    def b = new Book(params)
    b.save()
}

The data binding happens within the code new Book(params). By passing the params object to the domain class constructor Grails automatically recognizes that you are trying to bind from request parameters. So if we had an incoming request like:

/book/save?title=The%20Stand&author=Stephen%20King

Then the title and author request parameters would automatically be set on the domain class. You can use the properties property to perform data binding onto an existing instance:

def save() {
    def b = Book.get(params.id)
    b.properties = params
    b.save()
}

This has the same effect as using the implicit constructor.

When binding an empty String (a String with no characters in it, not even spaces), the data binder will convert the empty String to null. This simplifies the most common case where the intent is to treat an empty form field as having the value null since there isn’t a way to actually submit a null as a request parameter. When this behavior is not desirable the application may assign the value directly.

The mass property binding mechanism will by default automatically trim all Strings at binding time. To disable this behavior set the grails.databinding.trimStrings property to false in grails-app/conf/application.groovy.

// the default value is true
grails.databinding.trimStrings = false

// ...

The mass property binding mechanism will by default automatically convert all empty Strings to null at binding time. To disable this behavior set the grails.databinding.convertEmptyStringsToNull property to false in grails-app/conf/application.groovy.

// the default value is true
grails.databinding.convertEmptyStringsToNull = false

// ...

The order of events is that the String trimming happens and then null conversion happens so if trimStrings is true and convertEmptyStringsToNull is true, not only will empty Strings be converted to null but also blank Strings. A blank String is any String such that the trim() method returns an empty String.

These forms of data binding in Grails are very convenient, but also indiscriminate. In other words, they will bind all non-transient, typed instance properties of the target object, including ones that you may not want bound. Just because the form in your UI doesn’t submit all the properties, an attacker can still send malign data via a raw HTTP request. Fortunately, Grails also makes it easy to protect against such attacks - see the section titled "Data Binding and Security concerns" for more information.

Data binding and Single-ended Associations

If you have a one-to-one or many-to-one association you can use Grails' data binding capability to update these relationships too. For example if you have an incoming request such as:

/book/save?author.id=20

Grails will automatically detect the .id suffix on the request parameter and look up the Author instance for the given id when doing data binding such as:

def b = new Book(params)

An association property can be set to null by passing the literal String "null". For example:

/book/save?author.id=null

Data Binding and Many-ended Associations

If you have a one-to-many or many-to-many association there are different techniques for data binding depending of the association type.

If you have a Set based association (the default for a hasMany) then the simplest way to populate an association is to send a list of identifiers. For example consider the usage of <g:select> below:

<g:select name="books"
          from="${Book.list()}"
          size="5" multiple="yes" optionKey="id"
          value="${author?.books}" />

This produces a select box that lets you select multiple values. In this case if you submit the form Grails will automatically use the identifiers from the select box to populate the books association.

However, if you have a scenario where you want to update the properties of the associated objects the this technique won’t work. Instead you use the subscript operator:

<g:textField name="books[0].title" value="the Stand" />
<g:textField name="books[1].title" value="the Shining" />

However, with Set based association it is critical that you render the mark-up in the same order that you plan to do the update in. This is because a Set has no concept of order, so although we’re referring to books[0] and books[1] it is not guaranteed that the order of the association will be correct on the server side unless you apply some explicit sorting yourself.

This is not a problem if you use List based associations, since a List has a defined order and an index you can refer to. This is also true of Map based associations.

Note also that if the association you are binding to has a size of two and you refer to an element that is outside the size of association:

<g:textField name="books[0].title" value="the Stand" />
<g:textField name="books[1].title" value="the Shining" />
<g:textField name="books[2].title" value="Red Madder" />

Then Grails will automatically create a new instance for you at the defined position.

You can bind existing instances of the associated type to a List using the same .id syntax as you would use with a single-ended association. For example:

<g:select name="books[0].id" from="${bookList}"
          value="${author?.books[0]?.id}" />

<g:select name="books[1].id" from="${bookList}"
          value="${author?.books[1]?.id}" />

<g:select name="books[2].id" from="${bookList}"
          value="${author?.books[2]?.id}" />

Would allow individual entries in the books List to be selected separately.

Entries at particular indexes can be removed in the same way too. For example:

<g:select name="books[0].id"
          from="${Book.list()}"
          value="${author?.books[0]?.id}"
          noSelection="['null': '']"/>

Will render a select box that will remove the association at books[0] if the empty option is chosen.

Binding to a Map property works the same way except that the list index in the parameter name is replaced by the map key:

<g:select name="images[cover].id"
          from="${Image.list()}"
          value="${book?.images[cover]?.id}"
          noSelection="['null': '']"/>

This would bind the selected image into the Map property images under a key of "cover".

When binding to Maps, Arrays and Collections the data binder will automatically grow the size of the collections as necessary.

The default limit to how large the binder will grow a collection is 256. If the data binder encounters an entry that requires the collection be grown beyond that limit, the entry is ignored. The limit may be configured by assigning a value to the grails.databinding.autoGrowCollectionLimit property in application.groovy.
grails-app/conf/application.groovy
// the default value is 256
grails.databinding.autoGrowCollectionLimit = 128

// ...

Data binding with Multiple domain classes

It is possible to bind data to multiple domain objects from the params object.

For example so you have an incoming request to:

/book/save?book.title=The%20Stand&author.name=Stephen%20King

You’ll notice the difference with the above request is that each parameter has a prefix such as author. or book. which is used to isolate which parameters belong to which type. Grails' params object is like a multi-dimensional hash and you can index into it to isolate only a subset of the parameters to bind.

def b = new Book(params.book)

Notice how we use the prefix before the first dot of the book.title parameter to isolate only parameters below this level to bind. We could do the same with an Author domain class:

def a = new Author(params.author)

Data Binding and Action Arguments

Controller action arguments are subject to request parameter data binding. There are 2 categories of controller action arguments. The first category is command objects. Complex types are treated as command objects. See the Command Objects section of the user guide for details. The other category is basic object types. Supported types are the 8 primitives, their corresponding type wrappers and java.lang.String. The default behavior is to map request parameters to action arguments by name:

class AccountingController {

   // accountNumber will be initialized with the value of params.accountNumber
   // accountType will be initialized with params.accountType
   def displayInvoice(String accountNumber, int accountType) {
       // ...
   }
}

For primitive arguments and arguments which are instances of any of the primitive type wrapper classes a type conversion has to be carried out before the request parameter value can be bound to the action argument. The type conversion happens automatically. In a case like the example shown above, the params.accountType request parameter has to be converted to an int. If type conversion fails for any reason, the argument will have its default value per normal Java behavior (null for type wrapper references, false for booleans and zero for numbers) and a corresponding error will be added to the errors property of the defining controller.

/accounting/displayInvoice?accountNumber=B59786&accountType=bogusValue

Since "bogusValue" cannot be converted to type int, the value of accountType will be zero, the controller’s errors.hasErrors() will be true, the controller’s errors.errorCount will be equal to 1 and the controller’s errors.getFieldError('accountType') will contain the corresponding error.

If the argument name does not match the name of the request parameter then the @grails.web.RequestParameter annotation may be applied to an argument to express the name of the request parameter which should be bound to that argument:

import grails.web.RequestParameter

class AccountingController {

   // mainAccountNumber will be initialized with the value of params.accountNumber
   // accountType will be initialized with params.accountType
   def displayInvoice(@RequestParameter('accountNumber') String mainAccountNumber, int accountType) {
       // ...
   }
}

Data binding and type conversion errors

Sometimes when performing data binding it is not possible to convert a particular String into a particular target type. This results in a type conversion error. Grails will retain type conversion errors inside the errors property of a Grails domain class. For example:

class Book {
    ...
    URL publisherURL
}

Here we have a domain class Book that uses the java.net.URL class to represent URLs. Given an incoming request such as:

/book/save?publisherURL=a-bad-url

it is not possible to bind the string a-bad-url to the publisherURL property as a type mismatch error occurs. You can check for these like this:

def b = new Book(params)

if (b.hasErrors()) {
    println "The value ${b.errors.getFieldError('publisherURL').rejectedValue}" +
            " is not a valid URL!"
}

Although we have not yet covered error codes (for more information see the section on validation), for type conversion errors you would want a message from the grails-app/i18n/messages.properties file to use for the error. You can use a generic error message handler such as:

typeMismatch.java.net.URL=The field {0} is not a valid URL

Or a more specific one:

typeMismatch.Book.publisherURL=The publisher URL you specified is not a valid URL

The BindUsing Annotation

The BindUsing annotation may be used to define a custom binding mechanism for a particular field in a class. Any time data binding is being applied to the field the closure value of the annotation will be invoked with 2 arguments. The first argument is the object that data binding is being applied to and the second argument is DataBindingSource which is the data source for the data binding. The value returned from the closure will be bound to the property. The following example would result in the upper case version of the name value in the source being applied to the name field during data binding.

import grails.databinding.BindUsing

class SomeClass {
    @BindUsing({obj, source ->

        //source is DataSourceBinding which is similar to a Map
        //and defines getAt operation but source.name cannot be used here.
        //In order to get name from source use getAt instead as shown below.

        source['name']?.toUpperCase()
    })
    String name
}
Note that data binding is only possible when the name of the request parameter matches with the field name in the class. Here, name from request parameters matches with name from SomeClass.

The BindUsing annotation may be used to define a custom binding mechanism for all of the fields on a particular class. When the annotation is applied to a class, the value assigned to the annotation should be a class which implements the BindingHelper interface. An instance of that class will be used any time a value is bound to a property in the class that this annotation has been applied to.

@BindUsing(SomeClassWhichImplementsBindingHelper)
class SomeClass {
    String someProperty
    Integer someOtherProperty
}

The BindInitializer Annotation

The BindInitializer annotation may be used to initialize an associated field in a class if it is undefined. Unlike the BindUsing annotation, databinding will continue binding all nested properties on this association.

import grails.databinding.BindInitializer

class Account{}

class User {
  Account account

  // BindInitializer expects you to return a instance of the type
  // where it's declared on. You can use source as a parameter, in this case user.
  @BindInitializer({user-> new Contact(account:user.account) })
  Contact contact
}
class Contact{
  Account account
  String firstName
}
@BindInitializer only makes sense for associated entities, as per this use case.

Custom Data Converters

The binder will do a lot of type conversion automatically. Some applications may want to define their own mechanism for converting values and a simple way to do this is to write a class which implements ValueConverter and register an instance of that class as a bean in the Spring application context.

package com.myapp.converters

import grails.databinding.converters.ValueConverter

/**
 * A custom converter which will convert String of the
 * form 'city:state' into an Address object.
 */
class AddressValueConverter implements ValueConverter {

    boolean canConvert(value) {
        value instanceof String
    }

    def convert(value) {
        def pieces = value.split(':')
        new com.myapp.Address(city: pieces[0], state: pieces[1])
    }

    Class<?> getTargetType() {
        com.myapp.Address
    }
}

An instance of that class needs to be registered as a bean in the Spring application context. The bean name is not important. All beans that implemented ValueConverter will be automatically plugged in to the data binding process.

grails-app/conf/spring/resources.groovy
beans = {
    addressConverter com.myapp.converters.AddressValueConverter
    // ...
}
class Person {
    String firstName
    Address homeAddress
}

class Address {
    String city
    String state
}

def person = new Person()
person.properties = [firstName: 'Jeff', homeAddress: "O'Fallon:Missouri"]
assert person.firstName == 'Jeff'
assert person.homeAddress.city = "O'Fallon"
assert person.homeAddress.state = 'Missouri'

Date Formats For Data Binding

A custom date format may be specified to be used when binding a String to a Date value by applying the BindingFormat annotation to a Date field.

import grails.databinding.BindingFormat

class Person {
    @BindingFormat('MMddyyyy')
    Date birthDate
}

A global setting may be configured in application.groovy to define date formats which will be used application wide when binding to Date.

grails-app/conf/application.groovy
grails.databinding.dateFormats = ['MMddyyyy', 'yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss.S', "yyyy-MM-dd'T'hh:mm:ss'Z'"]

The formats specified in grails.databinding.dateFormats will be attempted in the order in which they are included in the List. If a property is marked with @BindingFormat, the @BindingFormat will take precedence over the values specified in grails.databinding.dateFormats.

The formats configured by default are:

  • yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss.S

  • yyyy-MM-dd’T’hh:mm:ss’Z'

  • yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss.S z

  • yyyy-MM-dd’T’HH:mm:ss.SSSX

Custom Formatted Converters

You may supply your own handler for the BindingFormat annotation by writing a class which implements the FormattedValueConverter interface and registering an instance of that class as a bean in the Spring application context. Below is an example of a trivial custom String formatter that might convert the case of a String based on the value assigned to the BindingFormat annotation.

package com.myapp.converters

import grails.databinding.converters.FormattedValueConverter

class FormattedStringValueConverter implements FormattedValueConverter {
    def convert(value, String format) {
        if('UPPERCASE' == format) {
            value = value.toUpperCase()
        } else if('LOWERCASE' == format) {
            value = value.toLowerCase()
        }
        value
    }

    Class getTargetType() {
        // specifies the type to which this converter may be applied
        String
    }
}

An instance of that class needs to be registered as a bean in the Spring application context. The bean name is not important. All beans that implemented FormattedValueConverter will be automatically plugged in to the data binding process.

grails-app/conf/spring/resources.groovy
beans = {
    formattedStringConverter com.myapp.converters.FormattedStringValueConverter
    // ...
}

With that in place the BindingFormat annotation may be applied to String fields to inform the data binder to take advantage of the custom converter.

import grails.databinding.BindingFormat

class Person {
    @BindingFormat('UPPERCASE')
    String someUpperCaseString

    @BindingFormat('LOWERCASE')
    String someLowerCaseString

    String someOtherString
}

Localized Binding Formats

The BindingFormat annotation supports localized format strings by using the optional code attribute. If a value is assigned to the code attribute that value will be used as the message code to retrieve the binding format string from the messageSource bean in the Spring application context and that lookup will be localized.

import grails.databinding.BindingFormat

class Person {
    @BindingFormat(code='date.formats.birthdays')
    Date birthDate
}
# grails-app/conf/i18n/messages.properties
date.formats.birthdays=MMddyyyy
# grails-app/conf/i18n/messages_es.properties
date.formats.birthdays=ddMMyyyy

Structured Data Binding Editors

A structured data binding editor is a helper class which can bind structured request parameters to a property. The common use case for structured binding is binding to a Date object which might be constructed from several smaller pieces of information contained in several request parameters with names like birthday_month, birthday_date and birthday_year. The structured editor would retrieve all of those individual pieces of information and use them to construct a Date.

The framework provides a structured editor for binding to Date objects. An application may register its own structured editors for whatever types are appropriate. Consider the following classes:

src/main/groovy/databinding/Gadget.groovy
package databinding

class Gadget {
    Shape expandedShape
    Shape compressedShape
}
src/main/groovy/databinding/Shape.groovy
package databinding

class Shape {
    int area
}

A Gadget has 2 Shape fields. A Shape has an area property. It may be that the application wants to accept request parameters like width and height and use those to calculate the area of a Shape at binding time. A structured binding editor is well suited for that.

The way to register a structured editor with the data binding process is to add an instance of the grails.databinding.TypedStructuredBindingEditor interface to the Spring application context. The easiest way to implement the TypedStructuredBindingEditor interface is to extend the org.grails.databinding.converters.AbstractStructuredBindingEditor abstract class and override the getPropertyValue method as shown below:

src/main/groovy/databinding/converters/StructuredShapeEditor.groovy
package databinding.converters

import databinding.Shape

import org.grails.databinding.converters.AbstractStructuredBindingEditor

class StructuredShapeEditor extends AbstractStructuredBindingEditor<Shape> {

    public Shape getPropertyValue(Map values) {
        // retrieve the individual values from the Map
        def width = values.width as int
        def height = values.height as int

        // use the values to calculate the area of the Shape
        def area = width * height

        // create and return a Shape with the appropriate area
        new Shape(area: area)
    }
}

An instance of that class needs to be registered with the Spring application context:

grails-app/conf/spring/resources.groovy
beans = {
    shapeEditor databinding.converters.StructuredShapeEditor
    // ...
}

When the data binder binds to an instance of the Gadget class it will check to see if there are request parameters with names compressedShape and expandedShape which have a value of "struct" and if they do exist, that will trigger the use of the StructuredShapeEditor. The individual components of the structure need to have parameter names of the form propertyName_structuredElementName. In the case of the Gadget class above that would mean that the compressedShape request parameter should have a value of "struct" and the compressedShape_width and compressedShape_height parameters should have values which represent the width and the height of the compressed Shape. Similarly, the expandedShape request parameter should have a value of "struct" and the expandedShape_width and expandedShape_height parameters should have values which represent the width and the height of the expanded Shape.

grails-app/controllers/demo/DemoController.groovy
class DemoController {

    def createGadget(Gadget gadget) {
        /*
        /demo/createGadget?expandedShape=struct&expandedShape_width=80&expandedShape_height=30
                          &compressedShape=struct&compressedShape_width=10&compressedShape_height=3

        */

        // with the request parameters shown above gadget.expandedShape.area would be 2400
        // and gadget.compressedShape.area would be 30
        // ...
    }
}

Typically the request parameters with "struct" as their value would be represented by hidden form fields.

Data Binding Event Listeners

The DataBindingListener interface provides a mechanism for listeners to be notified of data binding events. The interface looks like this:

package grails.databinding.events;

import grails.databinding.errors.BindingError;

/**
 * A listener which will be notified of events generated during data binding.
 *
 * @author Jeff Brown
 * @since 3.0
 * @see DataBindingListenerAdapter
 */
public interface DataBindingListener {

    /**
     * @return true if the listener is interested in events for the specified type.
     */
    boolean supports(Class<?> clazz);

    /**
     * Called when data binding is about to start.
     *
     * @param target The object data binding is being imposed upon
     * @param errors the Spring Errors instance (a org.springframework.validation.BindingResult)
     * @return true if data binding should continue
     */
    Boolean beforeBinding(Object target, Object errors);

    /**
     * Called when data binding is about to imposed on a property
     *
     * @param target The object data binding is being imposed upon
     * @param propertyName The name of the property being bound to
     * @param value The value of the property being bound
     * @param errors the Spring Errors instance (a org.springframework.validation.BindingResult)
     * @return true if data binding should continue, otherwise return false
     */
    Boolean beforeBinding(Object target, String propertyName, Object value, Object errors);

    /**
     * Called after data binding has been imposed on a property
     *
     * @param target The object data binding is being imposed upon
     * @param propertyName The name of the property that was bound to
     * @param errors the Spring Errors instance (a org.springframework.validation.BindingResult)
     */
    void afterBinding(Object target, String propertyName, Object errors);

    /**
     * Called after data binding has finished.
     *
     * @param target The object data binding is being imposed upon
     * @param errors the Spring Errors instance (a org.springframework.validation.BindingResult)
     */
    void afterBinding(Object target, Object errors);

    /**
     * Called when an error occurs binding to a property
     * @param error encapsulates information about the binding error
     * @param errors the Spring Errors instance (a org.springframework.validation.BindingResult)
     * @see BindingError
     */
    void bindingError(BindingError error, Object errors);
}

Any bean in the Spring application context which implements that interface will automatically be registered with the data binder. The DataBindingListenerAdapter class implements the DataBindingListener interface and provides default implementations for all of the methods in the interface so this class is well suited for subclassing so your listener class only needs to provide implementations for the methods your listener is interested in.

Using The Data Binder Directly

There are situations where an application may want to use the data binder directly. For example, to do binding in a Service on some arbitrary object which is not a domain class. The following will not work because the properties property is read only.

src/main/groovy/bindingdemo/Widget.groovy
package bindingdemo

class Widget {
    String name
    Integer size
}
grails-app/services/bindingdemo/WidgetService.groovy
package bindingdemo

class WidgetService {

    def updateWidget(Widget widget, Map data) {
        // this will throw an exception because
        // properties is read-only
        widget.properties = data
    }
}

An instance of the data binder is in the Spring application context with a bean name of grailsWebDataBinder. That bean implements the DataBinder interface. The following code demonstrates using the data binder directly.

grails-app/services/bindingdmeo/WidgetService
package bindingdemo

import grails.databinding.SimpleMapDataBindingSource

class WidgetService {

    // this bean will be autowired into the service
    def grailsWebDataBinder

    def updateWidget(Widget widget, Map data) {
        grailsWebDataBinder.bind widget, data as SimpleMapDataBindingSource
    }

}

See the DataBinder documentation for more information about overloaded versions of the bind method.

Data Binding and Security Concerns

When batch updating properties from request parameters you need to be careful not to allow clients to bind malicious data to domain classes and be persisted in the database. You can limit what properties are bound to a given domain class using the subscript operator:

def p = Person.get(1)

p.properties['firstName','lastName'] = params

In this case only the firstName and lastName properties will be bound.

Another way to do this is is to use Command Objects as the target of data binding instead of domain classes. Alternatively there is also the flexible bindData method.

The bindData method allows the same data binding capability, but to arbitrary objects:

def p = new Person()
bindData(p, params)

The bindData method also lets you exclude certain parameters that you don’t want updated:

def p = new Person()
bindData(p, params, [exclude: 'dateOfBirth'])

Or include only certain properties:

def p = new Person()
bindData(p, params, [include: ['firstName', 'lastName']])
If an empty List is provided as a value for the include parameter then all fields will be subject to binding if they are not explicitly excluded.

The bindable constraint can be used to globally prevent data binding for certain properties.

8.1.6 Responding with JSON

Using the respond method to output JSON

The respond method is the preferred way to return JSON and integrates with Content Negotiation and JSON Views.

The respond method provides content negotiation strategies to intelligently produce an appropriate response for the given client.

For example given the following controller and action:

grails-app/controllers/example/BookController.groovy
package example

class BookController {
    def index() {
        respond Book.list()
    }
}

The respond method will take the followings steps:

  1. If the client Accept header specifies a media type (for example application/json) use that

  2. If the file extension of the URI (for example /books.json) includes a format defined in the grails.mime.types property of grails-app/conf/application.yml use the media type defined in the configuration

The respond method will then look for an appriopriate Renderer for the object and the calculated media type from the RendererRegistry.

Grails includes a number of pre-configured Renderer implementations that will produce default representations of JSON responses for the argument passed to respond. For example going to the /book.json URI will produce JSON such as:

[
    {id:1,"title":"The Stand"},
    {id:2,"title":"Shining"}
]

Controlling the Priority of Media Types

By default if you define a controller there is no priority in terms of which format is sent back to the client and Grails assumes you wish to serve HTML as a response type.

However if your application is primarily an API, then you can specify the priorty using the responseFormats property:

grails-app/controllers/example/BookController.groovy
package example

class BookController {
    static responseFormats = ['json', 'html']
    def index() {
        respond Book.list()
    }
}

In the above example Grails will respond by default with json if the media type to respond with cannot be calculated from the Accept header or file extension.

Using Views to Output JSON Responses

If you define a view (either a GSP or a JSON View) then Grails will render the view when using the respond method by calculating a model from the argument passed to respond.

For example, in the previous listing, if you were to define grails-app/views/index.gson and grails-app/views/index.gsp views, these would be used if the client requested application/json or text/html media types respectively. Thus allowing you to define a single backend capable of serving responses to a web browser or representing your application’s API.

When rendering the view, Grails will calculate a model to pass to the view based on the type of the value passed to the respond method.

The following table summarizes this convention:

Example Argument Type Calculated Model Variable

respond Book.list()

java.util.List

bookList

respond( [] )

java.util.List

emptyList

respond Book.get(1)

example.Book

book

respond( [1,2] )

java.util.List

integerList

respond( [1,2] as Set )

java.util.Set

integerSet

respond( [1,2] as Integer[] )

Integer[]

integerArray

Using this convention you can reference the argument passed to respond from within your view:

grails-app/views/book/index.gson
@Field List<Book> bookList = []

json bookList, { Book book ->
    title book.title
}

You will notice that if Book.list() returns an empty list then the model variable name is translated to emptyList. This is by design and you should provide a default value in the view if no model variable is specified, such as the List in the example above:

grails-app/views/book/index.gson
// defaults to an empty list
@Field List<Book> bookList = []
...

There are cases where you may wish to be more explicit and control the name of the model variable. For example if you have a domain inheritance hierarchy where a call to list() my return different child classes relying on automatic calculation may not be reliable.

In this case you should pass the model directly using respond and a map argument:

respond bookList: Book.list()
When responding with any kind of mixed argument types in a collection, always use an explicit model name.

If you simply wish to augment the calculated model then you can do so by passing a model argument:

respond Book.list(), [model: [bookCount: Book.count()]]

The above example will produce a model like [bookList:books, bookCount:totalBooks], where the calculated model is combined with the model passed in the model argument.

Using the render method to output JSON

The render method can also be used to output JSON, but should only be used for simple cases that don’t warrant the creation of a JSON view:

def list() {

    def results = Book.list()

    render(contentType: "application/json") {
        books(results) { Book b ->
            title b.title
        }
    }
}

In this case the result would be something along the lines of:

[
    {"title":"The Stand"},
    {"title":"Shining"}
]
This technique for rendering JSON may be ok for very simple responses, but in general you should favour the use of JSON Views and use the view layer rather than embedding logic in your application.

The same dangers with naming conflicts described above for XML also apply to JSON building.

8.1.7 More on JSONBuilder

The previous section on XML and JSON responses covered simplistic examples of rendering XML and JSON responses. Whilst the XML builder used by Grails is the standard XmlSlurper found in Groovy.

For JSON, since Grails 3.1, Grails uses Groovy’s StreamingJsonBuilder by default and you can refer to the Groovy documentation and StreamingJsonBuilder API documentation on how to use it.

8.1.8 Responding with XML

8.1.9 Uploading Files

Programmatic File Uploads

Grails supports file uploads using Spring’s MultipartHttpServletRequest interface. The first step for file uploading is to create a multipart form like this:

Upload Form: <br />
    <g:uploadForm action="upload">
        <input type="file" name="myFile" />
        <input type="submit" />
    </g:uploadForm>

The uploadForm tag conveniently adds the enctype="multipart/form-data" attribute to the standard <g:form> tag.

There are then a number of ways to handle the file upload. One is to work with the Spring MultipartFile instance directly:

def upload() {
    def f = request.getFile('myFile')
    if (f.empty) {
        flash.message = 'file cannot be empty'
        render(view: 'uploadForm')
        return
    }

    f.transferTo(new File('/some/local/dir/myfile.txt'))
    response.sendError(200, 'Done')
}

This is convenient for doing transfers to other destinations and manipulating the file directly as you can obtain an InputStream and so on with the MultipartFile interface.

File Uploads through Data Binding

File uploads can also be performed using data binding. Consider this Image domain class:

class Image {
    byte[] myFile

    static constraints = {
        // Limit upload file size to 2MB
        myFile maxSize: 1024 * 1024 * 2
    }
}

If you create an image using the params object in the constructor as in the example below, Grails will automatically bind the file’s contents as a byte[] to the myFile property:

def img = new Image(params)

It’s important that you set the size or maxSize constraints, otherwise your database may be created with a small column size that can’t handle reasonably sized files. For example, both H2 and MySQL default to a blob size of 255 bytes for byte[] properties.

It is also possible to set the contents of the file as a string by changing the type of the myFile property on the image to a String type:

class Image {
   String myFile
}

Increase Upload Max File Size

Grails default size for file uploads is 128000 (~128KB). When this limit is exceeded you’ll see the following exception:

org.springframework.web.multipart.MultipartException: Could not parse multipart servlet request; nested exception is java.lang.IllegalStateException: org.apache.tomcat.util.http.fileupload.FileUploadBase$SizeLimitExceededException

You can configure the limit in your application.yml as follows:

grails-app/conf/application.yml
grails:
    controllers:
        upload:
            maxFileSize: 2000000
            maxRequestSize: 2000000

maxFileSize = The maximum size allowed for uploaded files.

maxRequestSize = The maximum size allowed for multipart/form-data requests.

Limit the file size to a maximum value in order to prevent denial of service attacks.

These limits exist to prevent DoS attacks and to enforce overall application performance

8.1.10 Command Objects

Grails controllers support the concept of command objects. A command object is a class that is used in conjunction with data binding, usually to allow validation of data that may not fit into an existing domain class.

A class is only considered to be a command object when it is used as a parameter of an action.

Declaring Command Objects

Command object classes are defined just like any other class.

class LoginCommand implements grails.validation.Validateable {
    String username
    String password

    static constraints = {
        username(blank: false, minSize: 6)
        password(blank: false, minSize: 6)
    }
}

In this example, the command object class implements the Validateable trait. The Validateable trait allows the definition of Constraints just like in domain classes. If the command object is defined in the same source file as the controller that is using it, Grails will automatically make it Validateable. It is not required that command object classes be validateable.

By default, all Validateable object properties which are not instances of java.util.Collection or java.util.Map are nullable: false. Instances of java.util.Collection and java.util.Map default to nullable: true. If you want a Validateable that has nullable: true properties by default, you can specify this by defining a defaultNullable method in the class:

class AuthorSearchCommand implements grails.validation.Validateable {
    String  name
    Integer age

    static boolean defaultNullable() {
        true
    }
}

In this example, both name and age will allow null values during validation.

Using Command Objects

To use command objects, controller actions may optionally specify any number of command object parameters. The parameter types must be supplied so that Grails knows what objects to create and initialize.

Before the controller action is executed Grails will automatically create an instance of the command object class and populate its properties by binding the request parameters. If the command object class is marked with Validateable then the command object will be validated. For example:

class LoginController {

    def login(LoginCommand cmd) {
        if (cmd.hasErrors()) {
            redirect(action: 'loginForm')
            return
        }

        // work with the command object data
    }
}

If the command object’s type is that of a domain class and there is an id request parameter then instead of invoking the domain class constructor to create a new instance a call will be made to the static get method on the domain class and the value of the id parameter will be passed as an argument.

Whatever is returned from that call to get is what will be passed into the controller action. This means that if there is an id request parameter and no corresponding record is found in the database then the value of the command object will be null. If an error occurs retrieving the instance from the database then null will be passed as an argument to the controller action and an error will be added the controller’s errors property.

If the command object’s type is a domain class and there is no id request parameter or there is an id request parameter and its value is empty then null will be passed into the controller action unless the HTTP request method is "POST", in which case a new instance of the domain class will be created by invoking the domain class constructor. For all of the cases where the domain class instance is non-null, data binding is only performed if the HTTP request method is "POST", "PUT" or "PATCH".

Command Objects And Request Parameter Names

Normally request parameter names will be mapped directly to property names in the command object. Nested parameter names may be used to bind down the object graph in an intuitive way.

In the example below a request parameter named name will be bound to the name property of the Person instance and a request parameter named address.city will be bound to the city property of the address property in the Person.

class StoreController {
    def buy(Person buyer) {
        // ...
    }
}

class Person {
    String name
    Address address
}

class Address {
    String city
}

A problem may arise if a controller action accepts multiple command objects which happen to contain the same property name. Consider the following example.

class StoreController {
    def buy(Person buyer, Product product) {
        // ...
    }
}

class Person {
    String name
    Address address
}

class Address {
    String city
}

class Product {
    String name
}

If there is a request parameter named name it isn’t clear if that should represent the name of the Product or the name of the Person. Another version of the problem can come up if a controller action accepts 2 command objects of the same type as shown below.

class StoreController {
    def buy(Person buyer, Person seller, Product product) {
        // ...
    }
}

class Person {
    String name
    Address address
}

class Address {
    String city
}

class Product {
    String name
}

To help deal with this the framework imposes special rules for mapping parameter names to command object types. The command object data binding will treat all parameters that begin with the controller action parameter name as belonging to the corresponding command object.

For example, the product.name request parameter will be bound to the name property in the product argument, the buyer.name request parameter will be bound to the name property in the buyer argument the seller.address.city request parameter will be bound to the city property of the address property of the seller argument, etc…​

Command Objects and Dependency Injection

Command objects can participate in dependency injection. This is useful if your command object has some custom validation logic which uses a Grails service:

class LoginCommand implements grails.validation.Validateable {

    def loginService

    String username
    String password

    static constraints = {
        username validator: { val, obj ->
            obj.loginService.canLogin(obj.username, obj.password)
        }
    }
}

In this example the command object interacts with the loginService bean which is injected by name from the Spring ApplicationContext.

Binding The Request Body To Command Objects

When a request is made to a controller action which accepts a command object and the request contains a body, Grails will attempt to parse the body of the request based on the request content type and use the body to do data binding on the command object. See the following example.

grails-app/controllers/bindingdemo/DemoController.groovy
package bindingdemo

class DemoController {

    def createWidget(Widget w) {
        render "Name: ${w?.name}, Size: ${w?.size}"
    }
}

class Widget {
    String name
    Integer size
}
$ curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"name":"Some Widget","42"}'[size] localhost:8080/demo/createWidget
 Name: Some Widget, Size: 42

$ curl -H "Content-Type: application/xml" -d '<widget><name>Some Other Widget</name><size>2112</size></widget>' localhost:8080/bodybind/demo/createWidget
 Name: Some Other Widget, Size: 2112

The request body will not be parsed under the following conditions:

  • The request method is GET

  • The request method is DELETE

  • The content length is 0

Note that the body of the request is being parsed to make that work. Any attempt to read the body of the request after that will fail since the corresponding input stream will be empty. The controller action can either use a command object or it can parse the body of the request on its own (either directly, or by referring to something like request.JSON), but cannot do both.

grails-app/controllers/bindingdemo/DemoController.groovy
package bindingdemo

class DemoController {

    def createWidget(Widget w) {
        // this will fail because it requires reading the body,
        // which has already been read.
        def json = request.JSON

        // ...

    }
}

Working with Lists of Command Objects

A common use case for command objects is a Command Object that contains a collection of another:

class DemoController {

    def createAuthor(AuthorCommand command) {
        // ...

    }

    class AuthorCommand {
        String fullName
        List<BookCommand> books
    }

    class BookCommand {
        String title
        String isbn
    }
}

On this example, we want to create an Author with multiple Books.

In order to make this work from the UI layer, you can do the following in your GSP:

<g:form name="submit-author-books" controller="demo" action="createAuthor">
    <g:fieldValue name="fullName" value=""/>
    <ul>
        <li>
            <g:fieldValue name="books[0].title" value=""/>
            <g:fieldValue name="books[0].isbn" value=""/>
        </li>

        <li>
            <g:fieldValue name="books[1].title" value=""/>
            <g:fieldValue name="books[1].isbn" value=""/>
        </li>
    </ul>
</g:form>

There is also support for JSON, so you can submit the following with correct databinding

{
    "fullName": "Graeme Rocher",
    "books": [{
        "title": "The Definitive Guide to Grails",
        "isbn": "1111-343455-1111"
    }, {
        "title": "The Definitive Guide to Grails 2",
        "isbn": "1111-343455-1112"
    }],
}

8.1.11 Handling Duplicate Form Submissions

Grails has built-in support for handling duplicate form submissions using the "Synchronizer Token Pattern". To get started you define a token on the form tag:

<g:form useToken="true" ...>

Then in your controller code you can use the withForm method to handle valid and invalid requests:

withForm {
   // good request
}.invalidToken {
   // bad request
}

If you only provide the withForm method and not the chained invalidToken method then by default Grails will store the invalid token in a flash.invalidToken variable and redirect the request back to the original page. This can then be checked in the view:

<g:if test="${flash.invalidToken}">
  Don't click the button twice!
</g:if>
The withForm tag makes use of the session and hence requires session affinity or clustered sessions if used in a cluster.

8.1.12 Simple Type Converters

Type Conversion Methods

If you prefer to avoid the overhead of data binding and simply want to convert incoming parameters (typically Strings) into another more appropriate type the params object has a number of convenience methods for each type:

def total = params.int('total')

The above example uses the int method, and there are also methods for boolean, long, char, short and so on. Each of these methods is null-safe and safe from any parsing errors, so you don’t have to perform any additional checks on the parameters.

Each of the conversion methods allows a default value to be passed as an optional second argument. The default value will be returned if a corresponding entry cannot be found in the map or if an error occurs during the conversion. Example:

def total = params.int('total', 42)

These same type conversion methods are also available on the attrs parameter of GSP tags.

Handling Multi Parameters

A common use case is dealing with multiple request parameters of the same name. For example you could get a query string such as ?name=Bob&name=Judy.

In this case dealing with one parameter and dealing with many has different semantics since Groovy’s iteration mechanics for String iterate over each character. To avoid this problem the params object provides a list method that always returns a list:

for (name in params.list('name')) {
    println name
}

8.1.13 Declarative Controller Exception Handling

Grails controllers support a simple mechanism for declarative exception handling. If a controller declares a method that accepts a single argument and the argument type is java.lang.Exception or some subclass of java.lang.Exception, that method will be invoked any time an action in that controller throws an exception of that type. See the following example.

grails-app/controllers/demo/DemoController.groovy
package demo

class DemoController {

    def someAction() {
        // do some work
    }

    def handleSQLException(SQLException e) {
        render 'A SQLException Was Handled'
    }

    def handleBatchUpdateException(BatchUpdateException e) {
        redirect controller: 'logging', action: 'batchProblem'
    }

    def handleNumberFormatException(NumberFormatException nfe) {
        [problemDescription: 'A Number Was Invalid']
    }
}

That controller will behave as if it were written something like this…​

grails-app/controllers/demo/DemoController.groovy
package demo

class DemoController {

    def someAction() {
        try {
            // do some work
        } catch (BatchUpdateException e) {
            return handleBatchUpdateException(e)
        } catch (SQLException e) {
            return handleSQLException(e)
        } catch (NumberFormatException e) {
            return handleNumberFormatException(e)
        }
    }

    def handleSQLException(SQLException e) {
        render 'A SQLException Was Handled'
    }

    def handleBatchUpdateException(BatchUpdateException e) {
        redirect controller: 'logging', action: 'batchProblem'
    }

    def handleNumberFormatException(NumberFormatException nfe) {
        [problemDescription: 'A Number Was Invalid']
    }
}

The exception handler method names can be any valid method name. The name is not what makes the method an exception handler, the Exception argument type is the important part.

The exception handler methods can do anything that a controller action can do including invoking render, redirect, returning a model, etc.

One way to share exception handler methods across multiple controllers is to use inheritance. Exception handler methods are inherited into subclasses so an application could define the exception handlers in an abstract class that multiple controllers extend from. Another way to share exception handler methods across multiple controllers is to use a trait, as shown below…​

src/main/groovy/com/demo/DatabaseExceptionHandler.groovy
package com.demo

trait DatabaseExceptionHandler {
    def handleSQLException(SQLException e) {
        // handle SQLException
    }

    def handleBatchUpdateException(BatchUpdateException e) {
        // handle BatchUpdateException
    }
}
grails-app/controllers/com/demo/DemoController.groovy
package com.demo

class DemoController implements DatabaseExceptionHandler {

    // all of the exception handler methods defined
    // in DatabaseExceptionHandler will be added to
    // this class at compile time
}

Exception handler methods must be present at compile time. Specifically, exception handler methods which are runtime metaprogrammed onto a controller class are not supported.

8.2 Groovy Server Pages

Groovy Servers Pages (or GSP for short) is Grails' view technology. It is designed to be familiar for users of technologies such as ASP and JSP, but to be far more flexible and intuitive.

Although GSP can render any format, not just HTML, it is more designed around rendering markup. If you are looking for a way to simplify JSON responses take a look at JSON Views.

GSPs live in the grails-app/views directory and are typically rendered automatically (by convention) or with the render method such as:

render(view: "index")

A GSP is typically a mix of mark-up and GSP tags which aid in view rendering.

Although it is possible to have Groovy logic embedded in your GSP and doing this will be covered in this document, the practice is strongly discouraged. Mixing mark-up and code is a bad thing and most GSP pages contain no code and needn’t do so.

A GSP typically has a "model" which is a set of variables that are used for view rendering. The model is passed to the GSP view from a controller. For example consider the following controller action:

def show() {
    [book: Book.get(params.id)]
}

This action will look up a Book instance and create a model that contains a key called book. This key can then be referenced within the GSP view using the name book:

${book.title}
Embedding data received from user input has the risk of making your application vulnerable to an Cross Site Scripting (XSS) attack. Please read the documentation on XSS prevention for information on how to prevent XSS attacks.

For more information on using GSP please refer to the dedicated GSP documentation.

8.3 URL Mappings

Throughout the documentation so far the convention used for URLs has been the default of /controller/action/id. However, this convention is not hard wired into Grails and is in fact controlled by a URL Mappings class located at grails-app/controllers/mypackage/UrlMappings.groovy.

The UrlMappings class contains a single property called mappings that has been assigned a block of code:

package mypackage

class UrlMappings {
    static mappings = {
    }
}

8.3.1 Mapping to Controllers and Actions

To create a simple mapping simply use a relative URL as the method name and specify named parameters for the controller and action to map to:

"/product"(controller: "product", action: "list")

In this case we’ve mapped the URL /product to the list action of the ProductController. Omit the action definition to map to the default action of the controller:

"/product"(controller: "product")

An alternative syntax is to assign the controller and action to use within a block passed to the method:

"/product" {
    controller = "product"
    action = "list"
}

Which syntax you use is largely dependent on personal preference.

If you have mappings that all fall under a particular path you can group mappings with the group method:

group "/product", {
    "/apple"(controller:"product", id:"apple")
    "/htc"(controller:"product", id:"htc")
}

You can also create nested group url mappings:

group "/store", {
    group "/product", {
        "/$id"(controller:"product")
    }
}

To rewrite one URI onto another explicit URI (rather than a controller/action pair) do something like this:

"/hello"(uri: "/hello.dispatch")

Rewriting specific URIs is often useful when integrating with other frameworks.

8.3.2 Mapping to REST resources

Since Grails 2.3, it possible to create RESTful URL mappings that map onto controllers by convention. The syntax to do so is as follows:

"/books"(resources:'book')

You define a base URI and the name of the controller to map to using the resources parameter. The above mapping will result in the following URLs:

HTTP Method URI Grails Action

GET

/books

index

GET

/books/create

create

POST

/books

save

GET

/books/${id}

show

GET

/books/${id}/edit

edit

PUT

/books/${id}

update

DELETE

/books/${id}

delete

If you are not sure which mapping will be generated for your case just run the command url-mappings-report in your grails console. It will give you a really neat report for all the url mappings.

If you wish to include or exclude any of the generated URL mappings you can do so with the includes or excludes parameter, which accepts the name of the Grails action to include or exclude:

"/books"(resources:'book', excludes:['delete', 'update'])

or

"/books"(resources:'book', includes:['index', 'show'])

Explicit REST Mappings

As of Grails 3.1, if you prefer not to rely on a resources mapping to define your mappings then you can prefix any URL mapping with the HTTP method name (in lower case) to indicate the HTTP method it applies to. The following URL mapping:

"/books"(resources:'book')

Is equivalent to:

get "/books"(controller:"book", action:"index")
get "/books/create"(controller:"book", action:"create")
post "/books"(controller:"book", action:"save")
get "/books/$id"(controller:"book", action:"show")
get "/books/$id/edit"(controller:"book", action:"edit")
put "/books/$id"(controller:"book", action:"update")
delete "/books/$id"(controller:"book", action:"delete")

Notice how the HTTP method name is prefixed prior to each URL mapping definition.

Single resources

A single resource is a resource for which there is only one (possibly per user) in the system. You can create a single resource using the single parameter (as opposed to resources):

"/book"(single:'book')

This results in the following URL mappings:

HTTP Method URI Grails Action

GET

/book/create

create

POST

/book

save

GET

/book

show

GET

/book/edit

edit

PUT

/book

update

DELETE

/book

delete

The main difference is that the id is not included in the URL mapping.

Nested Resources

You can nest resource mappings to generate child resources. For example:

"/books"(resources:'book') {
  "/authors"(resources:"author")
}

The above will result in the following URL mappings:

HTTP Method URL Grails Action

GET

/books/${bookId}/authors

index

GET

/books/${bookId}/authors/create

create

POST

/books/${bookId}/authors

save

GET

/books/${bookId}/authors/${id}

show

GET

/books/${bookId}/authors/edit/${id}

edit

PUT

/books/${bookId}/authors/${id}

update

DELETE

/books/${bookId}/authors/${id}

delete

You can also nest regular URL mappings within a resource mapping:

"/books"(resources: "book") {
    "/publisher"(controller:"publisher")
}

This will result in the following URL being available:

HTTP Method URL Grails Action

GET

/books/${bookId}/publisher

index

To map a URI directly below a resource then use a collection block:

"/books"(resources: "book") {
    collection {
        "/publisher"(controller:"publisher")
    }
}

This will result in the following URL being available (without the ID):

HTTP Method URL Grails Action

GET

/books/publisher

index

Linking to RESTful Mappings

You can link to any URL mapping created with the g:link tag provided by Grails simply by referencing the controller and action to link to:

<g:link controller="book" action="index">My Link</g:link>

As a convenience you can also pass a domain instance to the resource attribute of the link tag:

<g:link resource="${book}">My Link</g:link>

This will automatically produce the correct link (in this case "/books/1" for an id of "1").

The case of nested resources is a little different as they typically required two identifiers (the id of the resource and the one it is nested within). For example given the nested resources:

"/books"(resources:'book') {
  "/authors"(resources:"author")
}

If you wished to link to the show action of the author controller, you would write:

// Results in /books/1/authors/2
<g:link controller="author" action="show" method="GET" params="[bookId:1]" id="2">The Author</g:link>

However, to make this more concise there is a resource attribute to the link tag which can be used instead:

// Results in /books/1/authors/2
<g:link resource="book/author" action="show" bookId="1" id="2">My Link</g:link>

The resource attribute accepts a path to the resource separated by a slash (in this case "book/author"). The attributes of the tag can be used to specify the necessary bookId parameter.

8.3.3 Redirects In URL Mappings

Since Grails 2.3, it is possible to define URL mappings which specify a redirect. When a URL mapping specifies a redirect, any time that mapping matches an incoming request, a redirect is initiated with information provided by the mapping.

When a URL mapping specifies a redirect the mapping must either supply a String representing a URI to redirect to or must provide a Map representing the target of the redirect. That Map is structured just like the Map that may be passed as an argument to the redirect method in a controller.

"/viewBooks"(redirect: [uri: '/books/list'])
"/viewAuthors"(redirect: [controller: 'author', action: 'list'])
"/viewPublishers"(redirect: [controller: 'publisher', action: 'list', permanent: true])

Request parameters that were part of the original request will not be included in the redirect by default. To include them it is necessary to add the parameter keepParamsWhenRedirect: true.

"/viewBooks"(redirect: [uri: '/books/list', keepParamsWhenRedirect: true])
"/viewAuthors"(redirect: [controller: 'author', action: 'list', keepParamsWhenRedirect: true])
"/viewPublishers"(redirect: [controller: 'publisher', action: 'list', permanent: true, keepParamsWhenRedirect: true])

8.3.4 Embedded Variables

Simple Variables

The previous section demonstrated how to map simple URLs with concrete "tokens". In URL mapping speak tokens are the sequence of characters between each slash, '/'. A concrete token is one which is well defined such as as /product. However, in many circumstances you don’t know what the value of a particular token will be until runtime. In this case you can use variable placeholders within the URL for example:

static mappings = {
  "/product/$id"(controller: "product")
}

In this case by embedding a $id variable as the second token Grails will automatically map the second token into a parameter (available via the params object) called id. For example given the URL /product/MacBook, the following code will render "MacBook" to the response:

class ProductController {
     def index() { render params.id }
}

You can of course construct more complex examples of mappings. For example the traditional blog URL format could be mapped as follows:

static mappings = {
   "/$blog/$year/$month/$day/$id"(controller: "blog", action: "show")
}

The above mapping would let you do things like:

/graemerocher/2007/01/10/my_funky_blog_entry

The individual tokens in the URL would again be mapped into the params object with values available for year, month, day, id and so on.

Dynamic Controller and Action Names

Variables can also be used to dynamically construct the controller and action name. In fact the default Grails URL mappings use this technique:

static mappings = {
    "/$controller/$action?/$id?"()
}

Here the name of the controller, action and id are implicitly obtained from the variables controller, action and id embedded within the URL.

You can also resolve the controller name and action name to execute dynamically using a closure:

static mappings = {
    "/$controller" {
        action = { params.goHere }
    }
}

Optional Variables

Another characteristic of the default mapping is the ability to append a ? at the end of a variable to make it an optional token. In a further example this technique could be applied to the blog URL mapping to have more flexible linking:

static mappings = {
    "/$blog/$year?/$month?/$day?/$id?"(controller:"blog", action:"show")
}

With this mapping all of these URLs would match with only the relevant parameters being populated in the params object:

/graemerocher/2007/01/10/my_funky_blog_entry
/graemerocher/2007/01/10
/graemerocher/2007/01
/graemerocher/2007
/graemerocher

Optional File Extensions

If you wish to capture the extension of a particular path, then a special case mapping exists:

"/$controller/$action?/$id?(.$format)?"()

By adding the (.$format)? mapping you can access the file extension using the response.format property in a controller:

def index() {
    render "extension is ${response.format}"
}

Arbitrary Variables

You can also pass arbitrary parameters from the URL mapping into the controller by just setting them in the block passed to the mapping:

"/holiday/win" {
     id = "Marrakech"
     year = 2007
}

This variables will be available within the params object passed to the controller.

Dynamically Resolved Variables

The hard coded arbitrary variables are useful, but sometimes you need to calculate the name of the variable based on runtime factors. This is also possible by assigning a block to the variable name:

"/holiday/win" {
     id = { params.id }
     isEligible = { session.user != null } // must be logged in
}

In the above case the code within the blocks is resolved when the URL is actually matched and hence can be used in combination with all sorts of logic.

8.3.5 Mapping to Views

You can resolve a URL to a view without a controller or action involved. For example to map the root URL / to a GSP at the location grails-app/views/index.gsp you could use:

static mappings = {
    "/"(view: "/index")  // map the root URL
}

Alternatively if you need a view that is specific to a given controller you could use:

static mappings = {
   "/help"(controller: "site", view: "help") // to a view for a controller
}

8.3.6 Mapping to Response Codes

Grails also lets you map HTTP response codes to controllers, actions or views. Just use a method name that matches the response code you are interested in:

static mappings = {
   "403"(controller: "errors", action: "forbidden")
   "404"(controller: "errors", action: "notFound")
   "500"(controller: "errors", action: "serverError")
}

Or you can specify custom error pages:

static mappings = {
   "403"(view: "/errors/forbidden")
   "404"(view: "/errors/notFound")
   "500"(view: "/errors/serverError")
}

Declarative Error Handling

In addition you can configure handlers for individual exceptions:

static mappings = {
   "403"(view: "/errors/forbidden")
   "404"(view: "/errors/notFound")
   "500"(controller: "errors", action: "illegalArgument",
         exception: IllegalArgumentException)
   "500"(controller: "errors", action: "nullPointer",
         exception: NullPointerException)
   "500"(controller: "errors", action: "customException",
         exception: MyException)
   "500"(view: "/errors/serverError")
}

With this configuration, an IllegalArgumentException will be handled by the illegalArgument action in ErrorsController, a NullPointerException will be handled by the nullPointer action, and a MyException will be handled by the customException action. Other exceptions will be handled by the catch-all rule and use the /errors/serverError view.

You can access the exception from your custom error handing view or controller action using the request’s exception attribute like so:

class ErrorController {
    def handleError() {
        def exception = request.exception
        // perform desired processing to handle the exception
    }
}
If your error-handling controller action throws an exception as well, you’ll end up with a StackOverflowException.

8.3.7 Mapping to HTTP methods

URL mappings can also be configured to map based on the HTTP method (GET, POST, PUT or DELETE). This is very useful for RESTful APIs and for restricting mappings based on HTTP method.

As an example the following mappings provide a RESTful API URL mappings for the ProductController:

static mappings = {
   "/product/$id"(controller:"product", action: "update", method: "PUT")
}

Note that if you specify a HTTP method other than GET in your URL mapping, you also have to specify it when creating the corresponding link by passing the method argument to g:link or g:createLink to get a link of the desired format.

8.3.8 Mapping Wildcards

Grails' URL mappings mechanism also supports wildcard mappings. For example consider the following mapping:

static mappings = {
    "/images/*.jpg"(controller: "image")
}

This mapping will match all paths to images such as /image/logo.jpg. Of course you can achieve the same effect with a variable:

static mappings = {
    "/images/$name.jpg"(controller: "image")
}

However, you can also use double wildcards to match more than one level below:

static mappings = {
    "/images/**.jpg"(controller: "image")
}

In this cases the mapping will match /image/logo.jpg as well as /image/other/logo.jpg. Even better you can use a double wildcard variable:

static mappings = {
    // will match /image/logo.jpg and /image/other/logo.jpg
    "/images/$name**.jpg"(controller: "image")
}

In this case it will store the path matched by the wildcard inside a name parameter obtainable from the params object:

def name = params.name
println name // prints "logo" or "other/logo"

If you use wildcard URL mappings then you may want to exclude certain URIs from Grails' URL mapping process. To do this you can provide an excludes setting inside the UrlMappings.groovy class:

class UrlMappings {
    static excludes = ["/images/*", "/css/*"]
    static mappings = {
        ...
    }
}

In this case Grails won’t attempt to match any URIs that start with /images or /css.

8.3.9 Automatic Link Re-Writing

Another great feature of URL mappings is that they automatically customize the behaviour of the link tag so that changing the mappings don’t require you to go and change all of your links.

This is done through a URL re-writing technique that reverse engineers the links from the URL mappings. So given a mapping such as the blog one from an earlier section:

static mappings = {
   "/$blog/$year?/$month?/$day?/$id?"(controller:"blog", action:"show")
}

If you use the link tag as follows:

<g:link controller="blog" action="show"
        params="[blog:'fred', year:2007]">
    My Blog
</g:link>

<g:link controller="blog" action="show"
        params="[blog:'fred', year:2007, month:10]">
    My Blog - October 2007 Posts
</g:link>

Grails will automatically re-write the URL in the correct format:

<a href="/fred/2007">My Blog</a>
<a href="/fred/2007/10">My Blog - October 2007 Posts</a>

8.3.10 Applying Constraints

URL Mappings also support Grails' unified validation constraints mechanism, which lets you further "constrain" how a URL is matched. For example, if we revisit the blog sample code from earlier, the mapping currently looks like this:

static mappings = {
   "/$blog/$year?/$month?/$day?/$id?"(controller:"blog", action:"show")
}

This allows URLs such as:

/graemerocher/2007/01/10/my_funky_blog_entry

However, it would also allow:

/graemerocher/not_a_year/not_a_month/not_a_day/my_funky_blog_entry

This is problematic as it forces you to do some clever parsing in the controller code. Luckily, URL Mappings can be constrained to further validate the URL tokens:

"/$blog/$year?/$month?/$day?/$id?" {
     controller = "blog"
     action = "show"
     constraints {
          year(matches:/\\\d{4}/)
          month(matches:/\\\d{2}/)
          day(matches:/\\\d{2}/)
     }
}

In this case the constraints ensure that the year, month and day parameters match a particular valid pattern thus relieving you of that burden later on.

8.3.11 Named URL Mappings

URL Mappings also support named mappings, that is mappings which have a name associated with them. The name may be used to refer to a specific mapping when links are generated.

The syntax for defining a named mapping is as follows:

static mappings = {
   name <mapping name>: <url pattern> {
      // ...
   }
}

For example:

static mappings = {
    name personList: "/showPeople" {
        controller = 'person'
        action = 'list'
    }
    name accountDetails: "/details/$acctNumber" {
        controller = 'product'
        action = 'accountDetails'
    }
}

The mapping may be referenced in a link tag in a GSP.

<g:link mapping="personList">List People</g:link>

That would result in:

<a href="/showPeople">List People</a>

Parameters may be specified using the params attribute.

<g:link mapping="accountDetails" params="[acctNumber:'8675309']">
    Show Account
</g:link>

That would result in:

<a href="/details/8675309">Show Account</a>

Alternatively you may reference a named mapping using the link namespace.

<link:personList>List People</link:personList>

That would result in:

<a href="/showPeople">List People</a>

The link namespace approach allows parameters to be specified as attributes.

<link:accountDetails acctNumber="8675309">Show Account</link:accountDetails>

That would result in:

<a href="/details/8675309">Show Account</a>

To specify attributes that should be applied to the generated href, specify a Map value to the attrs attribute. These attributes will be applied directly to the href, not passed through to be used as request parameters.

<link:accountDetails attrs="[class: 'fancy']" acctNumber="8675309">
    Show Account
</link:accountDetails>

That would result in:

<a href="/details/8675309" class="fancy">Show Account</a>

8.3.12 Customizing URL Formats

The default URL Mapping mechanism supports camel case names in the URLs. The default URL for accessing an action named addNumbers in a controller named MathHelperController would be something like /mathHelper/addNumbers. Grails allows for the customization of this pattern and provides an implementation which replaces the camel case convention with a hyphenated convention that would support URLs like /math-helper/add-numbers. To enable hyphenated URLs assign a value of "hyphenated" to the grails.web.url.converter property in grails-app/conf/application.groovy.

grails-app/conf/application.groovy
grails.web.url.converter = 'hyphenated'

Arbitrary strategies may be plugged in by providing a class which implements the UrlConverter interface and adding an instance of that class to the Spring application context with the bean name of grails.web.UrlConverter.BEAN_NAME. If Grails finds a bean in the context with that name, it will be used as the default converter and there is no need to assign a value to the grails.web.url.converter config property.

src/main/groovy/com/myapplication/MyUrlConverterImpl.groovy
package com.myapplication

class MyUrlConverterImpl implements grails.web.UrlConverter {

    String toUrlElement(String propertyOrClassName) {
        // return some representation of a property or class name that should be used in URLs...
    }
}
grails-app/conf/spring/resources.groovy
beans = {
    "${grails.web.UrlConverter.BEAN_NAME}"(com.myapplication.MyUrlConverterImpl)
}

8.3.13 Namespaced Controllers

If an application defines multiple controllers with the same name in different packages, the controllers must be defined in a namespace. The way to define a namespace for a controller is to define a static property named namespace in the controller and assign a String to the property that represents the namespace.

grails-app/controllers/com/app/reporting/AdminController.groovy
package com.app.reporting

class AdminController {

    static namespace = 'reports'

    // ...
}
grails-app/controllers/com/app/security/AdminController.groovy
package com.app.security

class AdminController {

    static namespace = 'users'

    // ...
}

When defining url mappings which should be associated with a namespaced controller, the namespace variable needs to be part of the URL mapping.

grails-app/controllers/UrlMappings.groovy
class UrlMappings {

    static mappings = {
        '/userAdmin' {
            controller = 'admin'
            namespace = 'users'
        }

        '/reportAdmin' {
            controller = 'admin'
            namespace = 'reports'
        }

        "/$namespace/$controller/$action?"()
    }
}

Reverse URL mappings also require that the namespace be specified.

<g:link controller="admin" namespace="reports">Click For Report Admin</g:link>
<g:link controller="admin" namespace="users">Click For User Admin</g:link>

When resolving a URL mapping (forward or reverse) to a namespaced controller, a mapping will only match if the namespace has been provided. If the application provides several controllers with the same name in different packages, at most 1 of them may be defined without a namespace property. If there are multiple controllers with the same name that do not define a namespace property, the framework will not know how to distinguish between them for forward or reverse mapping resolutions.

It is allowed for an application to use a plugin which provides a controller with the same name as a controller provided by the application and for neither of the controllers to define a namespace property as long as the controllers are in separate packages. For example, an application may include a controller named com.accounting.ReportingController and the application may use a plugin which provides a controller named com.humanresources.ReportingController. The only issue with that is the URL mapping for the controller provided by the plugin needs to be explicit in specifying that the mapping applies to the ReportingController which is provided by the plugin.

See the following example.

static mappings = {
    "/accountingReports" {
        controller = "reporting"
    }
    "/humanResourceReports" {
        controller = "reporting"
        plugin = "humanResources"
    }
}

With that mapping in place, a request to /accountingReports will be handled by the ReportingController which is defined in the application. A request to /humanResourceReports will be handled by the ReportingController which is provided by the humanResources plugin.

There could be any number of ReportingController controllers provided by any number of plugins but no plugin may provide more than one ReportingController even if they are defined in separate packages.

Assigning a value to the plugin variable in the mapping is only required if there are multiple controllers with the same name available at runtime provided by the application and/or plugins. If the humanResources plugin provides a ReportingController and there is no other ReportingController available at runtime, the following mapping would work.

static mappings = {
    "/humanResourceReports" {
        controller = "reporting"
    }
}

It is best practice to be explicit about the fact that the controller is being provided by a plugin.

8.4 CORS

Spring Boot provides CORS support out of the box, but it is difficult to configure in a Grails application due to the way UrlMappings are used instead of annotations that define URLs. Starting with Grails 3.2.1, we have added a way to configure CORS that makes sense in a Grails application.

Once enabled, the default setting is "wide open".

application.yml
grails:
    cors:
        enabled: true

That will produce a mapping to all urls /** with:

allowedOrigins

['*']

allowedMethods

['*']

allowedHeaders

['*']

exposedHeaders

null

maxAge

1800

allowCredentials

false

Some of these settings come directly from Spring Boot and can change in future versions. See Spring CORS Configuration Documentation

All of those settings can be easily overridden.

application.yml
grails:
    cors:
        enabled: true
        allowedOrigins:
            - http://localhost:5000

In the example above, the allowedOrigins setting will replace [*].

You can also configure different URLs.

application.yml
grails:
    cors:
        enabled: true
        allowedHeaders:
            - Content-Type
        mappings:
            '[/api/**]':
                allowedOrigins:
                    - http://localhost:5000
                # Other configurations not specified default to the global config

Note that the mapping key must be made with bracket notation (see https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-boot/wiki/Spring-Boot-Configuration-Binding#map-based-binding), which is a breaking change between Spring Boot 1.5 (Grails 3) and Spring Boot 2 (Grails 4).

Specifying at least one mapping will disable the creation of the global mapping (/**). If you wish to keep that setting, you should specify it along with your other mappings.

The settings above will produce a single mapping of /api/** with the following settings:

allowedOrigins

['http://localhost:5000']

allowedMethods

['*']

allowedHeaders

['Content-Type']

exposedHeaders

null

maxAge

1800

allowCredentials

false

If you don’t wish to override any of the default settings, but only want to specify URLs, you can do so like this example:

application.yml
grails:
    cors:
        enabled: true
        mappings:
            '[/api/**]': inherit

8.5 Interceptors

Grails provides standalone Interceptors using the create-interceptor command:

$ grails create-interceptor MyInterceptor

The above command will create an Interceptor in the grails-app/controllers directory with the following default contents:

class MyInterceptor {

  boolean before() { true }

  boolean after() { true }

  void afterView() {
    // no-op
  }

}

Interceptors vs Filters

In versions of Grails prior to Grails 3.0, Grails supported the notion of filters. These are still supported for backwards compatibility but are considered deprecated.

The new interceptors concept in Grails 3.0 is superior in a number of ways, most significantly interceptors can use Groovy’s CompileStatic annotation to optimize performance (something which is often critical as interceptors can be executed for every request.)

8.5.1 Defining Interceptors

By default interceptors will match the controllers with the same name. For example if you have an interceptor called BookInterceptor then all requests to the actions of the BookController will trigger the interceptor.

An Interceptor implements the Interceptor trait and provides 3 methods that can be used to intercept requests:

/**
 * Executed before a matched action
 *
 * @return Whether the action should continue and execute
 */
boolean before() { true }

/**
 * Executed after the action executes but prior to view rendering
 *
 * @return True if view rendering should continue, false otherwise
 */
boolean after() { true }

/**
 * Executed after view rendering completes
 */
void afterView() {}

As described above the before method is executed prior to an action and can cancel the execution of the action by returning false.

The after method is executed after an action executes and can halt view rendering if it returns false. The after method can also modify the view or model using the view and model properties respectively:

boolean after() {
  model.foo = "bar" // add a new model attribute called 'foo'
  view = 'alternate' // render a different view called 'alternate'
  true
}

The afterView method is executed after view rendering completes. If an exception occurs, the exception is available using the throwable property of the Interceptor trait.

8.5.2 Matching Requests with Interceptors

As mention in the previous section, by default an interceptor will match only requests to the associated controller by convention. However you can configure the interceptor to match any request using the match or matchAll methods defined in the Interceptor API.

The matching methods return a Matcher instance which can be used to configure how the interceptor matches the request.

For example the following interceptor will match all requests except those to the login controller:

class AuthInterceptor {
  AuthInterceptor() {
    matchAll()
    .excludes(controller:"login")
  }

  boolean before() {
    // perform authentication
  }
}

You can also perform matching using named argument:

class LoggingInterceptor {
  LoggingInterceptor() {
    match(controller:"book", action:"show") // using strings
    match(controller: ~/(author|publisher)/) // using regex
  }

  boolean before() {
    ...
  }
}

You can use any number of matchers defined in your interceptor. They will be executed in the order in which they have been defined. For example the above interceptor will match for all of the following:

  • when the show action of BookController is called

  • when AuthorController or PublisherController is called

All named arguments except for uri accept either a String or a Regex expression. The uri argument supports a String path that is compatible with Spring’s AntPathMatcher. The possible named arguments are:

  • namespace - The namespace of the controller

  • controller - The name of the controller

  • action - The name of the action

  • method - The HTTP method

  • uri - The URI of the request. If this argument is used then all other arguments will be ignored and only this will be used.

8.5.3 Ordering Interceptor Execution

Interceptors can be ordered by defining an order property that defines a priority.

For example:

class AuthInterceptor {

  int order = HIGHEST_PRECEDENCE

  ...
}

The default value of the order property is 0. Interceptor execution order is determined by sorting the order property in an ascending direction and executing the lowest numerically ordered interceptor first.

The values HIGHEST_PRECEDENCE and LOWEST_PRECEDENCE can be used to define filters that should should run first or last respectively.

Note that if you write an interceptor that is to be used by others it is better increment or decrement the HIGHEST_PRECEDENCE and LOWEST_PRECEDENCE to allow other interceptors to be inserted before or after the interceptor you are authoring:

int order = HIGHEST_PRECEDENCE + 50

// or

int order = LOWEST_PRECEDENCE - 50

To find out the computed order of interceptors you can add a debug logger to logback.groovy as follows:

logger 'grails.artefact.Interceptor', DEBUG, ['STDOUT'], false

You can override any interceptors default order by using bean override configuration in grails-app/conf/application.yml:

beans:
  authInterceptor:
    order: 50

Or in grails-app/conf/application.groovy:

beans {
  authInterceptor {
    order = 50
  }
}

Thus giving you complete control over interceptor execution order.

8.6 Content Negotiation

Grails has built in support for Content negotiation using either the HTTP Accept header, an explicit format request parameter or the extension of a mapped URI.

Configuring Mime Types

Before you can start dealing with content negotiation you need to tell Grails what content types you wish to support. By default Grails comes configured with a number of different content types within grails-app/conf/application.yml using the grails.mime.types setting:

grails:
    mime:
        types:
            all: '*/*'
            atom: application/atom+xml
            css: text/css
            csv: text/csv
            form: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
            html:
              - text/html
              - application/xhtml+xml
            js: text/javascript
            json:
              - application/json
              - text/json
            multipartForm: multipart/form-data
            rss: application/rss+xml
            text: text/plain
            hal:
              - application/hal+json
              - application/hal+xml
            xml:
              - text/xml
              - application/xml

The setting can also be done in grails-app/conf/application.groovy as shown below:

grails.mime.types = [ // the first one is the default format
    all:           '*/*', // 'all' maps to '*' or the first available format in withFormat
    atom:          'application/atom+xml',
    css:           'text/css',
    csv:           'text/csv',
    form:          'application/x-www-form-urlencoded',
    html:          ['text/html','application/xhtml+xml'],
    js:            'text/javascript',
    json:          ['application/json', 'text/json'],
    multipartForm: 'multipart/form-data',
    rss:           'application/rss+xml',
    text:          'text/plain',
    hal:           ['application/hal+json','application/hal+xml'],
    xml:           ['text/xml', 'application/xml']
]

The above bit of configuration allows Grails to detect to format of a request containing either the 'text/xml' or 'application/xml' media types as simply 'xml'. You can add your own types by simply adding new entries into the map. The first one is the default format.

Content Negotiation using the format Request Parameter

Let’s say a controller action can return a resource in a variety of formats: HTML, XML, and JSON. What format will the client get? The easiest and most reliable way for the client to control this is through a format URL parameter.

So if you, as a browser or some other client, want a resource as XML, you can use a URL like this:

http://my.domain.org/books.xml
The request parameters format is allowed as well http://my.domain.org/books?format=xml, but the default Grails URL Mapping get "/$controller(.$format)?"(action:"index") will override the format parameter with null. So the default mapping should be updated to get "/$controller"(action:"index").

The result of this on the server side is a format property on the response object with the value xml .

You can also define this parameter in the URL Mappings definition:

"/book/list"(controller:"book", action:"list") {
    format = "xml"
}

You could code your controller action to return XML based on this property, but you can also make use of the controller-specific withFormat() method:

This example requires the addition of the org.grails.plugins:grails-plugin-converters plugin
import grails.converters.JSON
import grails.converters.XML

class BookController {

    def list() {
        def books = Book.list()

        withFormat {
            html bookList: books
            json { render books as JSON }
            xml { render books as XML }
            '*' { render books as JSON }
        }
    }
}

In this example, Grails will only execute the block inside withFormat() that matches the requested content type. So if the preferred format is html then Grails will execute the html() call only. Each 'block' can either be a map model for the corresponding view (as we are doing for 'html' in the above example) or a closure. The closure can contain any standard action code, for example it can return a model or render content directly.

When no format matches explicitly, a * (wildcard) block can be used to handle all other formats.

There is a special format, "all", that is handled differently from the explicit formats. If "all" is specified (normally this happens through the Accept header - see below), then the first block of withFormat() is executed when there isn’t a * (wildcard) block available.

You should not add an explicit "all" block. In this example, a format of "all" will trigger the html handler (html is the first block and there is no * block).

withFormat {
    html bookList: books
    json { render books as JSON }
    xml { render books as XML }
}
When using withFormat make sure it is the last call in your controller action as the return value of the withFormat method is used by the action to dictate what happens next.

Using the Accept header

Every incoming HTTP request has a special Accept header that defines what media types (or mime types) a client can "accept". In older browsers this is typically:

*/*

which simply means anything. However, newer browsers send more interesting values such as this one sent by Firefox:

text/xml, application/xml, application/xhtml+xml, text/html;q=0.9, \
    text/plain;q=0.8, image/png, */*;q=0.5

This particular accept header is unhelpful because it indicates that XML is the preferred response format whereas the user is really expecting HTML. That’s why Grails ignores the accept header by default for browsers. However, non-browser clients are typically more specific in their requirements and can send accept headers such as

application/json

As mentioned the default configuration in Grails is to ignore the accept header for browsers. This is done by the configuration setting grails.mime.disable.accept.header.userAgents, which is configured to detect the major rendering engines and ignore their ACCEPT headers. This allows Grails' content negotiation to continue to work for non-browser clients:

grails.mime.disable.accept.header.userAgents = ['Gecko', 'WebKit', 'Presto', 'Trident']

For example, if it sees the accept header above ('application/json') it will set format to json as you’d expect. And of course this works with the withFormat() method in just the same way as when the format URL parameter is set (although the URL parameter takes precedence).

An accept header of '*/\*' results in a value of all for the format property.

If the accept header is used but contains no registered content types, Grails will assume a broken browser is making the request and will set the HTML format - note that this is different from how the other content negotiation modes work as those would activate the "all" format!

Request format vs. Response format

As of Grails 2.0, there is a separate notion of the request format and the response format. The request format is dictated by the CONTENT_TYPE header and is typically used to detect if the incoming request can be parsed into XML or JSON, whilst the response format uses the file extension, format parameter or ACCEPT header to attempt to deliver an appropriate response to the client.

The withFormat available on controllers deals specifically with the response format. If you wish to add logic that deals with the request format then you can do so using a separate withFormat method available on the request:

request.withFormat {
    xml {
        // read XML
    }
    json {
        // read JSON
    }
}

Content Negotiation with URI Extensions

Grails also supports content negotiation using URI extensions. For example given the following URI:

/book/list.xml

This works as a result of the default URL Mapping definition which is:

"/$controller/$action?/$id?(.$format)?"{

Note the inclusion of the format variable in the path. If you do not wish to use content negotiation via the file extension then simply remove this part of the URL mapping:

"/$controller/$action?/$id?"{

Testing Content Negotiation

To test content negotiation in a unit or integration test (see the section on Testing) you can either manipulate the incoming request headers:

void testJavascriptOutput() {
    def controller = new TestController()
    controller.request.addHeader "Accept",
              "text/javascript, text/html, application/xml, text/xml, */*"

    controller.testAction()
    assertEquals "alert('hello')", controller.response.contentAsString
}

Or you can set the format parameter to achieve a similar effect:

void testJavascriptOutput() {
    def controller = new TestController()
    controller.params.format = 'js'

    controller.testAction()
    assertEquals "alert('hello')", controller.response.contentAsString
}

9 Traits

Overview

Grails provides a number of traits which provide access to properties and behavior that may be accessed from various Grails artefacts as well as arbitrary Groovy classes which are part of a Grails project. Many of these traits are automatically added to Grails artefact classes (like controllers and taglibs, for example) and are easy to add to other classes.

9.1 Traits Provided by Grails

Grails artefacts are automatically augmented with certain traits at compile time.

Interceptor Trait

Tag Library Trait

Below is a list of other traits provided by the framework. The javadocs provide more detail about methods and properties related to each trait.

Trait Brief Description

grails.web.api.WebAttributes

Common Web Attributes

grails.web.api.ServletAttributes

Servlet API Attributes

grails.web.databinding.DataBinder

Data Binding API

grails.artefact.controller.support.RequestForwarder

Request Forwarding API

grails.artefact.controller.support.ResponseRedirector

Response Redirecting API

grails.artefact.controller.support.ResponseRenderer

Response Rendering API

grails.validation.Validateable

Validation API

9.1.1 WebAttributes Trait Example

WebAttributes is one of the traits provided by the framework. Any Groovy class may implement this trait to inherit all of the properties and behaviors provided by the trait.

src/main/groovy/demo/Helper.groovy
package demo

import grails.web.api.WebAttributes

class Helper implements WebAttributes {

    List<String> getControllerNames() {
        // There is no need to pass grailsApplication as an argument
        // or otherwise inject the grailsApplication property.  The
        // WebAttributes trait provides access to grailsApplication.
        grailsApplication.getArtefacts('Controller')*.name
    }
}

The traits are compatible with static compilation…​

src/main/groovy/demo/Helper.groovy
package demo

import grails.web.api.WebAttributes
import groovy.transform.CompileStatic

@CompileStatic
class Helper implements WebAttributes {

    List<String> getControllerNames() {
        // There is no need to pass grailsApplication as an argument
        // or otherwise inject the grailsApplication property.  The
        // WebAttributes trait provides access to grailsApplication.
        grailsApplication.getArtefacts('Controller')*.name
    }
}

10 REST

REST is not really a technology in itself, but more an architectural pattern. REST is very simple and just involves using plain XML or JSON as a communication medium, combined with URL patterns that are "representational" of the underlying system, and HTTP methods such as GET, PUT, POST and DELETE.

Each HTTP method maps to an action type. For example GET for retrieving data, POST for creating data, PUT for updating and so on.

Grails includes flexible features that make it easy to create RESTful APIs. Creating a RESTful resource can be as simple as one line of code, as demonstrated in the next section.

10.1 Domain classes as REST resources

The easiest way to create a RESTful API in Grails is to expose a domain class as a REST resource. This can be done by adding the grails.rest.Resource transformation to any domain class:

import grails.rest.*

@Resource(uri='/books')
class Book {

    String title

    static constraints = {
        title blank:false
    }
}

Simply by adding the Resource transformation and specifying a URI, your domain class will automatically be available as a REST resource in either XML or JSON formats. The transformation will automatically register the necessary RESTful URL mapping and create a controller called BookController.

You can try it out by adding some test data to BootStrap.groovy:

def init = { servletContext ->
    new Book(title:"The Stand").save()
    new Book(title:"The Shining").save()
}

And then hitting the URL http://localhost:8080/books/1, which will render the response like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<book id="1">
    <title>The Stand</title>
</book>

If you change the URL to http://localhost:8080/books/1.json you will get a JSON response such as:

{"id":1,"title":"The Stand"}

If you wish to change the default to return JSON instead of XML, you can do this by setting the formats attribute of the Resource transformation:

import grails.rest.*

@Resource(uri='/books', formats=['json', 'xml'])
class Book {
    ...
}

With the above example JSON will be prioritized. The list that is passed should contain the names of the formats that the resource should expose. The names of formats are defined in the grails.mime.types setting of application.groovy:

grails.mime.types = [
    ...
    json:          ['application/json', 'text/json'],
    ...
    xml:           ['text/xml', 'application/xml']
]

See the section on Configuring Mime Types in the user guide for more information.

Instead of using the file extension in the URI, you can also obtain a JSON response using the ACCEPT header. Here’s an example using the Unix curl tool:

$ curl -i -H "Accept: application/json" localhost:8080/books/1
{"id":1,"title":"The Stand"}

This works thanks to Grails' Content Negotiation features.

You can create a new resource by issuing a POST request:

$ curl -i -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"title":"Along Came A Spider"}' localhost:8080/books
HTTP/1.1 201 Created
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
...

Updating can be done with a PUT request:

$ curl -i -X PUT -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"title":"Along Came A Spider"}' localhost:8080/books/1
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
...

Finally a resource can be deleted with DELETE request:

$ curl -i -X DELETE localhost:8080/books/1
HTTP/1.1 204 No Content
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
...

As you can see, the Resource transformation enables all of the HTTP method verbs on the resource. You can enable only read-only capabilities by setting the readOnly attribute to true:

import grails.rest.*

@Resource(uri='/books', readOnly=true)
class Book {
    ...
}

In this case POST, PUT and DELETE requests will be forbidden.

10.2 Mapping to REST resources

If you prefer to keep the declaration of the URL mapping in your UrlMappings.groovy file then simply removing the uri attribute of the Resource transformation and adding the following line to UrlMappings.groovy will suffice:

"/books"(resources:"book")

Extending your API to include more end points then becomes trivial:

"/books"(resources:"book") {
    "/publisher"(controller:"publisher", method:"GET")
}

The above example will expose the URI /books/1/publisher.

A more detailed explanation on creating RESTful URL mappings can be found in the URL Mappings section of the user guide.

10.3 Linking to REST resources from GSP pages

The link tag offers an easy way to link to any domain class resource:

<g:link resource="${book}">My Link</g:link>

However, currently you cannot use g:link to link to the DELETE action and most browsers do not support sending the DELETE method directly.

The best way to accomplish this is to use a form submit:

<form action="/book/2" method="post">
         <input type="hidden" name="_method" value="DELETE"/>
</form>

Grails supports overriding the request method via the hidden _method parameter. This is for browser compatibility purposes. This is useful when using restful resource mappings to create powerful web interfaces. To make a link fire this type of event, perhaps capture all click events for links with a data-method attribute and issue a form submit via JavaScript.

10.4 Versioning REST resources

A common requirement with a REST API is to expose different versions at the same time. There are a few ways this can be achieved in Grails.

Versioning using the URI

A common approach is to use the URI to version APIs (although this approach is discouraged in favour of Hypermedia). For example, you can define the following URL mappings:

"/books/v1"(resources:"book", namespace:'v1')
"/books/v2"(resources:"book", namespace:'v2')

That will match the following controllers:

package myapp.v1

class BookController {
    static namespace = 'v1'
}

package myapp.v2

class BookController {
    static namespace = 'v2'
}

This approach has the disadvantage of requiring two different URI namespaces for your API.

Versioning with the Accept-Version header

As an alternative Grails supports the passing of an Accept-Version header from clients. For example you can define the following URL mappings:

"/books"(version:'1.0', resources:"book", namespace:'v1')
"/books"(version:'2.0', resources:"book", namespace:'v2')

Then in the client simply pass which version you need using the Accept-Version header:

$ curl -i -H "Accept-Version: 1.0" -X GET http://localhost:8080/books

Versioning using Hypermedia / Mime Types

Another approach to versioning is to use Mime Type definitions to declare the version of your custom media types (see the section on "Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State" for more information about Hypermedia concepts). For example, in application.groovy you can declare a custom Mime Type for your resource that includes a version parameter (the 'v' parameter):

grails.mime.types = [
    all: '*/*',
    book: "application/vnd.books.org.book+json;v=1.0",
    bookv2: "application/vnd.books.org.book+json;v=2.0",
    ...
}
It is critical that place your new mime types after the 'all' Mime Type because if the Content Type of the request cannot be established then the first entry in the map is used for the response. If you have your new Mime Type at the top then Grails will always try and send back your new Mime Type if the requested Mime Type cannot be established.

Then override the renderer (see the section on "Customizing Response Rendering" for more information on custom renderers) to send back the custom Mime Type in grails-app/conf/spring/resourses.groovy:

import grails.rest.render.json.*
import grails.web.mime.*

beans = {
    bookRendererV1(JsonRenderer, myapp.v1.Book, new MimeType("application/vnd.books.org.book+json", [v:"1.0"]))
    bookRendererV2(JsonRenderer, myapp.v2.Book, new MimeType("application/vnd.books.org.book+json", [v:"2.0"]))
}

Then update the list of acceptable response formats in your controller:

class BookController extends RestfulController {
    static responseFormats = ['json', 'xml', 'book', 'bookv2']

    // ...
}

Then using the Accept header you can specify which version you need using the Mime Type:

$ curl -i -H "Accept: application/vnd.books.org.book+json;v=1.0" -X GET http://localhost:8080/books

10.5 Implementing REST controllers

The Resource transformation is a quick way to get started, but typically you’ll want to customize the controller logic, the rendering of the response or extend the API to include additional actions.

10.5.1 Extending the RestfulController super class

The easiest way to get started doing so is to create a new controller for your resource that extends the grails.rest.RestfulController super class. For example:

class BookController extends RestfulController<Book> {
    static responseFormats = ['json', 'xml']
    BookController() {
        super(Book)
    }
}

To customize any logic you can just override the appropriate action. The following table provides the names of the action names and the URIs they map to:

HTTP Method URI Controller Action

GET

/books

index

GET

/books/create

create

POST

/books

save

GET

/books/${id}

show

GET

/books/${id}/edit

edit

PUT

/books/${id}

update

DELETE

/books/${id}

delete

The create and edit actions are only needed if the controller exposes an HTML interface.

As an example, if you have a nested resource then you would typically want to query both the parent and the child identifiers. For example, given the following URL mapping:

"/authors"(resources:'author') {
    "/books"(resources:'book')
}

You could implement the nested controller as follows:

class BookController extends RestfulController {
    static responseFormats = ['json', 'xml']
    BookController() {
        super(Book)
    }

    @Override
    protected Book queryForResource(Serializable id) {
        Book.where {
            id == id && author.id == params.authorId
        }.find()
    }

}

The example above subclasses RestfulController and overrides the protected queryForResource method to customize the query for the resource to take into account the parent resource.

Customizing Data Binding In A RestfulController Subclass

The RestfulController class contains code which does data binding for actions like save and update. The class defines a getObjectToBind() method which returns a value which will be used as the source for data binding. For example, the update action does something like this…​

class RestfulController<T> {

    def update() {
        T instance = // retrieve instance from the database...

        instance.properties = getObjectToBind()

        // ...
    }

    // ...
}

By default the getObjectToBind() method returns the request object. When the request object is used as the binding source, if the request has a body then the body will be parsed and its contents will be used to do the data binding, otherwise the request parameters will be used to do the data binding. Subclasses of RestfulController may override the getObjectToBind() method and return anything that is a valid binding source, including a Map or a DataBindingSource. For most use cases binding the request is appropriate but the getObjectToBind() method allows for changing that behavior where desired.

Using custom subclass of RestfulController with Resource annotation

You can also customize the behaviour of the controller that backs the Resource annotation.

The class must provide a constructor that takes a domain class as its argument. The second constructor is required for supporting Resource annotation with readOnly=true.

This is a template that can be used for subclassed RestfulController classes used in Resource annotations:

class SubclassRestfulController<T> extends RestfulController<T> {
    SubclassRestfulController(Class<T> domainClass) {
        this(domainClass, false)
    }

    SubclassRestfulController(Class<T> domainClass, boolean readOnly) {
        super(domainClass, readOnly)
    }
}

You can specify the super class of the controller that backs the Resource annotation with the superClass attribute.

import grails.rest.*

@Resource(uri='/books', superClass=SubclassRestfulController)
class Book {

    String title

    static constraints = {
        title blank:false
    }
}

10.5.2 Implementing REST Controllers Step by Step

If you don’t want to take advantage of the features provided by the RestfulController super class, then you can implement each HTTP verb yourself manually. The first step is to create a controller:

$ grails create-controller book

Then add some useful imports and enable readOnly by default:

import grails.gorm.transactions.*
import static org.springframework.http.HttpStatus.*
import static org.springframework.http.HttpMethod.*

@Transactional(readOnly = true)
class BookController {
    ...
}

Recall that each HTTP verb matches a particular Grails action according to the following conventions:

HTTP Method URI Controller Action

GET

/books

index

GET

/books/${id}

show

GET

/books/create

create

GET

/books/${id}/edit

edit

POST

/books

save

PUT

/books/${id}

update

DELETE

/books/${id}

delete

The create and edit actions are already required if you plan to implement an HTML interface for the REST resource. They are there in order to render appropriate HTML forms to create and edit a resource. They can be discarded if that is not a requirement.

The key to implementing REST actions is the respond method introduced in Grails 2.3. The respond method tries to produce the most appropriate response for the requested content type (JSON, XML, HTML etc.)

Implementing the 'index' action

For example, to implement the index action, simply call the respond method passing the list of objects to respond with:

def index(Integer max) {
    params.max = Math.min(max ?: 10, 100)
    respond Book.list(params), model:[bookCount: Book.count()]
}

Note that in the above example we also use the model argument of the respond method to supply the total count. This is only required if you plan to support pagination via some user interface.

The respond method will, using Content Negotiation, attempt to reply with the most appropriate response given the content type requested by the client (via the ACCEPT header or file extension).

If the content type is established to be HTML then a model will be produced such that the action above would be the equivalent of writing:

def index(Integer max) {
    params.max = Math.min(max ?: 10, 100)
    [bookList: Book.list(params), bookCount: Book.count()]
}

By providing an index.gsp file you can render an appropriate view for the given model. If the content type is something other than HTML then the respond method will attempt to lookup an appropriate grails.rest.render.Renderer instance that is capable of rendering the passed object. This is done by inspecting the grails.rest.render.RendererRegistry.

By default there are already renderers configured for JSON and XML, to find out how to register a custom renderer see the section on "Customizing Response Rendering".

Implementing the 'show' action

The show action, which is used to display and individual resource by id, can be implemented in one line of Groovy code (excluding the method signature):

def show(Book book) {
    respond book
}

By specifying the domain instance as a parameter to the action Grails will automatically attempt to lookup the domain instance using the id parameter of the request. If the domain instance doesn’t exist, then null will be passed into the action. The respond method will return a 404 error if null is passed otherwise once again it will attempt to render an appropriate response. If the format is HTML then an appropriate model will produced. The following action is functionally equivalent to the above action:

def show(Book book) {
    if(book == null) {
        render status:404
    }
    else {
        return [book: book]
    }
}

Implementing the 'save' action

The save action creates new resource representations. To start off, simply define an action that accepts a resource as the first argument and mark it as Transactional with the grails.gorm.transactions.Transactional transform:

@Transactional
def save(Book book) {
    ...
}

Then the first thing to do is check whether the resource has any validation errors and if so respond with the errors:

if(book.hasErrors()) {
    respond book.errors, view:'create'
}
else {
    ...
}

In the case of HTML the 'create' view will be rendered again so the user can correct the invalid input. In the case of other formats (JSON, XML etc.), the errors object itself will be rendered in the appropriate format and a status code of 422 (UNPROCESSABLE_ENTITY) returned.

If there are no errors then the resource can be saved and an appropriate response sent:

book.save flush:true
    withFormat {
        html {
            flash.message = message(code: 'default.created.message', args: [message(code: 'book.label', default: 'Book'), book.id])
            redirect book
        }
        '*' { render status: CREATED }
    }

In the case of HTML a redirect is issued to the originating resource and for other formats a status code of 201 (CREATED) is returned.

Implementing the 'update' action

The update action updates an existing resource representation and is largely similar to the save action. First define the method signature:

@Transactional
def update(Book book) {
    ...
}

If the resource exists then Grails will load the resource, otherwise null is passed. In the case of null, you should return a 404:

if(book == null) {
        render status: NOT_FOUND
    }
    else {
        ...
    }

Then once again check for errors validation errors and if so respond with the errors:

if(book.hasErrors()) {
    respond book.errors, view:'edit'
}
else {
    ...
}

In the case of HTML the 'edit' view will be rendered again so the user can correct the invalid input. In the case of other formats (JSON, XML etc.) the errors object itself will be rendered in the appropriate format and a status code of 422 (UNPROCESSABLE_ENTITY) returned.

If there are no errors then the resource can be saved and an appropriate response sent:

book.save flush:true
withFormat {
    html {
        flash.message = message(code: 'default.updated.message', args: [message(code: 'book.label', default: 'Book'), book.id])
        redirect book
    }
    '*' { render status: OK }
}

In the case of HTML a redirect is issued to the originating resource and for other formats a status code of 200 (OK) is returned.

Implementing the 'delete' action

The delete action deletes an existing resource. The implementation is largely similar to the update action, except the delete() method is called instead:

book.delete flush:true
withFormat {
    html {
        flash.message = message(code: 'default.deleted.message', args: [message(code: 'Book.label', default: 'Book'), book.id])
        redirect action:"index", method:"GET"
    }
    '*'{ render status: NO_CONTENT }
}

Notice that for an HTML response a redirect is issued back to the index action, whilst for other content types a response code 204 (NO_CONTENT) is returned.

10.5.3 Generating a REST controller using scaffolding

To see some of these concepts in action and help you get going, the Scaffolding plugin, version 2.0 and above, can generate a REST ready controller for you, simply run the command:

$ grails generate-controller <<Domain Class Name>>

10.6 Calling REST Services with HttpClient

Calling Grails REST services - as well as third-party services - is very straightforward using the Micronaut HTTP Client. This HTTP client has both a low-level API and a higher level AOP-driven API, making it useful for both simple requests as well as building declarative, type-safe API layers.

To use the Micronaut HTTP client you must have the micronaut-http-client dependency on your classpath. Add the following dependency to your build.gradle file.

build.gradle
compile 'io.micronaut:micronaut-http-client'

Low-level API

The HttpClient interface forms the basis for the low-level API. This interfaces declares methods to help ease executing HTTP requests and receive responses.

The majority of the methods in the HttpClient interface returns Reactive Streams Publisher instances, and a sub-interface called RxHttpClient is included that provides a variation of the HttpClient interface that returns RxJava Flowable types. When using HttpClient in a blocking flow, you may wish to call toBlocking() to return an instance of BlockingHttpClient.

There are a few ways by which you can obtain a reference to a HttpClient. The most simple way is using the create method

Creating an HTTP client
    List<Album> searchWithApi(String searchTerm) {
        String baseUrl = "https://itunes.apple.com/"

        HttpClient client = HttpClient.create(baseUrl.toURL()).toBlocking() (1)

        HttpRequest request = HttpRequest.GET("/search?limit=25&media=music&entity=album&term=${searchTerm}")
        HttpResponse<String> resp = client.exchange(request, String)
        client.close() (2)

        String json = resp.body()
        ObjectMapper objectMapper = new ObjectMapper() (3)
        objectMapper.configure(DeserializationFeature.FAIL_ON_UNKNOWN_PROPERTIES, false)
        SearchResult searchResult = objectMapper.readValue(json, SearchResult)
        searchResult.results
    }
1 Create a new instance of HttpClient with the create method, and convert to an instance of BlockingHttpClient with toBlocking(),
2 The client should be closed using the close method to prevent thread leaking.
3 Jackson’s ObjectMapper API can be used to map the raw JSON to POGOs, in this case SearchResult

Consult the Http Client section of the Micronaut user guide for more information on using the HttpClient low-level API.

Declarative API

A declarative HTTP client can be written by adding the @Client annotation to any interface or abstract class. Using Micronaut’s AOP support (see the Micronaut user guide section on Introduction Advice), the abstract or interface methods will be implemented for you at compilation time as HTTP calls. Declarative clients can return data-bound POGOs (or POJOs) without requiring special handling from the calling code.

package example.grails

import io.micronaut.http.annotation.Get
import io.micronaut.http.client.annotation.Client


@Client("https://start.grails.org")
interface GrailsAppForgeClient {

    @Get("/{version}/profiles")
    List<Map> profiles(String version)
}

Note that HTTP client methods are annotated with the appropriate HTTP method, such as @Get or @Post.

To use a client like the one in the above example, simply inject an instance of the client into any bean using the @Autowired annotation.

  @Autowired GrailsAppForgeClient appForgeClient

    List<Map> profiles(String grailsVersion) {
        respond appForgeClient.profiles(grailsVersion)
    }

For more details on writing and using declarative clients, consult the Http Client section of the Micronaut user guide.

10.7 The REST Profile

Since Grails 3.1, Grails supports a tailored profile for creating REST applications that provides a more focused set of dependencies and commands.

To get started with the REST profile, create an application specifying rest-api as the name of the profile:

$ grails create-app my-api --profile rest-api

This will create a new REST application that provides the following features:

  • Default set of commands for creating and generating REST endpoints

  • Defaults to using JSON views for rendering responses (see the next section)

  • Fewer plugins than the default Grails plugin (no GSP, no Asset Pipeline, nothing HTML related)

You will notice for example in the grails-app/views directory that there are *.gson files for rendering the default index page and as well as any 404 and 500 errors.

If you issue the following set of commands:

$ grails create-domain-class my.api.Book
$ grails generate-all my.api.Book

Instead of CRUD HTML interface a REST endpoint is generated that produces JSON responses. In addition, the generated functional and unit tests by default test the REST endpoint.

10.8 The AngularJS Profile

Since Grails 3.1, Grails supports a profile for creating applications with AngularJS that provides a more focused set of dependencies and commands. The angular profile inherits from the REST profile and therefore has all of the commands and properties that the REST profile has.

To get started with the AngularJS profile, create an application specifying angularjs as the name of the profile:

$ grails create-app my-api --profile angularjs

This will create a new Grails application that provides the following features:

  • Default set of commands for creating AngularJS artefacts

  • Gradle plugin to manage client side dependencies

  • Gradle plugin to execute client side unit tests

  • Asset Pipeline plugins to ease development

By default the AngularJS profile includes GSP support in order to render the index page. This is necessary because the profile is designed around asset pipeline.

The new commands are:

  • create-ng-component

  • create-ng-controller

  • create-ng-directive

  • create-ng-domain

  • create-ng-module

  • create-ng-service

Project structure

The AngularJS profile is designed around a specific project structure. The create-ng commands will automatically create modules where they do not exist.

Example:

$ grails create-ng-controller foo

This will produce a fooController.js file in grails-app/assets/javascripts/${default package name}/controllers.

By default the angularjs profile will create files in the javascripts directory. You can change that behavior in your configuration with the key grails.codegen.angular.assetDir.
$ grails create-ng-domain foo.bar

This will produce a Bar.js file in grails-app/assets/javascripts/foo/domains. It will also create the "foo" module if it does not already exist.

$ grails create-ng-module foo.bar

This will produce a foo.bar.js file in grails-app/assets/javascripts/foo/bar. Note the naming convention for modules is different than other artefacts.

$ grails create-ng-service foo.bar --type constant

This will produce a bar.js file in grails-app/assets/javascripts/foo/services. It will also create the "foo" module if it does not already exist. The create-ng-service command accepts a flag -type. The types that can be used are:

  • service

  • factory default

  • value

  • provider

  • constant

Along with the artefacts themselves, the profile will also produce a skeleton unit test file under src/test/javascripts for each create command.

Client side dependencies

The Gradle Bower Plugin is used to manage dependencies with bower. Visit the plugin documentation to learn how to use the plugin.

Unit Testing

The Gradle Karma Plugin is used to execute client side unit tests. All generated tests are written with Jasmine. Visit the plugin documentation to learn how to use the plugin.

Asset Pipeline

The AngularJS profile includes several asset pipeline plugins to make development easier.

10.9 The Angular Profile

Since Grails 3.2.1, Grails supports a profile for creating applications with Angular that provides a more future facing setup.

The biggest change in this profile is that the profile creates a multi project gradle build. This is the first profile to have done so. The Angular profile relies on the Angular CLI to manage the client side application. The server side application is the same as an application created with the rest-api profile.

To get started with the Angular profile, create an application specifying angular as the name of the profile:

$ grails create-app my-app --profile angular

This will create a my-app directory with the following contents:

client/
gradle/
gradlew
gradlew.bat
server/
settings.gradle

The entire client application lives in the client folder and the entire server application lives in the server folder.

Prerequisites

To use this profile, you should have Node, NPM, and the Angular CLI installed. Node should be at least version 5 and NPM should be at least version 3.

Project Structure

The Angular profile is designed to be used with the Angular CLI. The CLI was used to create the client application side of the profile to start with. The CLI provides commands to do most of the things you would want to do with the client application, including creating components or services. Because of that, the profile itself provides no commands to do those same things.

Running The App

To execute the server side application only, you can execute the bootRun task in the server project:

./gradlew server:bootRun

The same can be done for the client application:

./gradlew client:bootRun

To execute both, you must do so in parallel:

./gradlew bootRun --parallel
It is necessary to do so in parallel because by default Gradle executes tasks synchronously, and neither of the bootRun tasks will "finish".

Testing

The default client application that comes with the profile provides some tests that can be executed. To execute tests in the application:

./gradlew test

The test task will execute unit tests with Karma and Jasmine.

./gradlew integrationTest

The integrationTest task will execute e2e tests with Protractor.

You can execute the test and integrationTest tasks on each of the sub-projects the same as you would bootRun.

CORS

Because the client side and server side will be running on separate ports, CORS configuration is required. By default the profile will configure the server side to allow CORS from all hosts via the following config:

server/grails-app/conf/application.yml
grails:
    cors:
        enabled: true

See the section on CORS in the user guide for information on configuring this feature for your needs.

10.10 JSON Views

As mentioned in the previous section the REST profile by default uses JSON views to render JSON responses. These play a similar role to GSP, but instead are optimized for outputing JSON responses instead of HTML.

You can continue to separate your application in terms of MVC, with the logic of your application residing in controllers and services, whilst view related matters are handled by JSON views.

JSON views also provide the flexibility to easily customize the JSON presented to clients without having to resort to relatively complex marshalling libraries like Jackson or Grails' marshaller API.

Since Grails 3.1, JSON views are considered by the Grails team the best way to present JSON output for the client, the section on writing custom marshallers has been removed from the user guide. If you are looking for information on that topic, see the Grails 3.0.x guide.

10.10.1 Getting Started

If you are using the REST or AngularJS profiles then the JSON views plugin will already be included and you can skip the remainder of this section. Otherwise you will need to modify your build.gradle to include the necessary plugin to activate JSON views:

compile 'org.grails.plugins:views-json:1.0.0' // or whatever is the latest version
The source code repository for JSON views can be found on Github if you are looking for more documentation and contributions

In order to compile JSON views for production deployment you should also activate the Gradle plugin by first modifying the buildscript block:

buildscript {
    ...
    dependencies {
        ...
        classpath "org.grails.plugins:views-gradle:1.0.0"
    }
}

Then apply the org.grails.plugins.views-json Gradle plugin after any Grails core gradle plugins:

...
apply plugin: "org.grails.grails-web"
apply plugin: "org.grails.plugins.views-json"

This will add a compileGsonViews task to Gradle, which is invoked prior to creating the production JAR or WAR file.

10.10.2 Creating JSON Views

JSON views go into the grails-app/views directory and end with the .gson suffix. They are regular Groovy scripts and can be opened in any Groovy editor.

Example JSON view:

json.person {
    name "bob"
}
To open them in the Groovy editor in Intellij IDEA, double click on the file and when asked which file to associate it with, choose "Groovy"

The above JSON view produces:

{"person":{"name":"bob"}}

There is an implicit json variable which is an instance of StreamingJsonBuilder.

Example usages:

json(1,2,3) == "[1,2,3]"
json { name "Bob" } == '{"name":"Bob"}'
json([1,2,3]) { n it } == '[{"n":1},{"n":2},{"n":3}]'

Refer to the API documentation on StreamingJsonBuilder for more information about what is possible.

10.10.3 JSON View Templates

You can define templates starting with underscore _. For example given the following template called _person.gson:

model {
    Person person
}
json {
    name person.name
    age person.age
}

You can render it with a view as follows:

model {
    Family family
}
json {
    name family.father.name
    age family.father.age
    oldestChild g.render(template:"person", model:[person: family.children.max { Person p -> p.age } ])
    children g.render(template:"person", collection: family.children, var:'person')
}

Alternatively for a more concise way to invoke templates, using the tmpl variable:

model {
    Family family
}
json {
    name family.father.name
    age family.father.age
    oldestChild tmpl.person( family.children.max { Person p -> p.age } ] )
    children tmpl.person( family.children )
}

10.10.4 Rendering Domain Classes with JSON Views

Typically your model may involve one or many domain instances. JSON views provide a render method for rendering these.

For example given the following domain class:

class Book {
    String title
}

And the following template:

model {
    Book book
}

json g.render(book)

The resulting output is:

{id:1, title:"The Stand"}

You can customize the rendering by including or excluding properties:

json g.render(book, [includes:['title']])

Or by providing a closure to add additional JSON output:

json g.render(book) {
    pages 1000
}

10.10.5 JSON Views by Convention

There are a few useful conventions you can follow when creating JSON views. For example if you have a domain class called Book, then creating a template located at grails-app/views/book/_book.gson and using the respond method will result in rendering the template:

def show(Long id) {
    respond Book.get(id)
}

In addition if an error occurs during validation by default Grails will try to render a template called grails-app/views/book/_errors.gson, otherwise it will try to render grails-app/views/errors/_errors.gson if the former doesn’t exist.

This is useful because when persisting objects you can respond with validation errors to render these aforementioned templates:

@Transactional
def save(Book book) {
    if (book.hasErrors()) {
        transactionStatus.setRollbackOnly()
        respond book.errors
    }
    else {
        // valid object
    }
}

If a validation error occurs in the above example the grails-app/views/book/_errors.gson template will be rendered.

For more information on JSON views (and Markup views), see the JSON Views user guide.

10.11 Customizing Response Rendering

If you are looking for a more low-level API and JSON or Markup views don’t suite your needs then you may want to consider implementing a custom renderer.

10.11.1 Customizing the Default Renderers

The default renderers for XML and JSON can be found in the grails.rest.render.xml and grails.rest.render.json packages respectively. These use the Grails converters (grails.converters.XML and grails.converters.JSON) by default for response rendering.

You can easily customize response rendering using these default renderers. A common change you may want to make is to include or exclude certain properties from rendering.

Including or Excluding Properties from Rendering

As mentioned previously, Grails maintains a registry of grails.rest.render.Renderer instances. There are some default configured renderers and the ability to register or override renderers for a given domain class or even for a collection of domain classes. To include a particular property from rendering you need to register a custom renderer by defining a bean in grails-app/conf/spring/resources.groovy:

import grails.rest.render.xml.*

beans = {
    bookRenderer(XmlRenderer, Book) {
        includes = ['title']
    }
}
The bean name is not important (Grails will scan the application context for all registered renderer beans), but for organizational and readability purposes it is recommended you name it something meaningful.

To exclude a property, the excludes property of the XmlRenderer class can be used:

import grails.rest.render.xml.*

beans = {
    bookRenderer(XmlRenderer, Book) {
        excludes = ['isbn']
    }
}

Customizing the Converters

As mentioned previously, the default renders use the grails.converters package under the covers. In other words, under the covers they essentially do the following:

import grails.converters.*

...
render book as XML

// or render book as JSON

Why the separation between converters and renderers? Well a renderer has more flexibility to use whatever rendering technology you chose. When implementing a custom renderer you could use Jackson, Gson or any Java library to implement the renderer. Converters on the other hand are very much tied to Grails' own marshalling implementation.

10.11.2 Implementing a Custom Renderer

If you want even more control of the rendering or prefer to use your own marshalling techniques then you can implement your own Renderer instance. For example below is a simple implementation that customizes the rendering of the Book class:

package myapp
import grails.rest.render.*
import grails.web.mime.MimeType

class BookXmlRenderer extends AbstractRenderer<Book> {
    BookXmlRenderer() {
        super(Book, [MimeType.XML,MimeType.TEXT_XML] as MimeType[])
    }

    void render(Book object, RenderContext context) {
        context.contentType = MimeType.XML.name

        def xml = new groovy.xml.MarkupBuilder(context.writer)
        xml.book(id: object.id, title:object.title)
    }
}

The AbstractRenderer super class has a constructor that takes the class that it renders and the MimeType(s) that are accepted (via the ACCEPT header or file extension) for the renderer.

To configure this renderer, simply add it is a bean to grails-app/conf/spring/resources.groovy:

beans = {
    bookRenderer(myapp.BookXmlRenderer)
}

The result will be that all Book instances will be rendered in the following format:

<book id="1" title="The Stand"/>
If you change the rendering to a completely different format like the above, then you also need to change the binding if you plan to support POST and PUT requests. Grails will not automatically know how to bind data from a custom XML format to a domain class otherwise. See the section on "Customizing Binding of Resources" for further information.

Container Renderers

A grails.rest.render.ContainerRenderer is a renderer that renders responses for containers of objects (lists, maps, collections etc.). The interface is largely the same as the Renderer interface except for the addition of the getComponentType() method, which should return the "contained" type. For example:

class BookListRenderer implements ContainerRenderer<List, Book> {
    Class<List> getTargetType() { List }
    Class<Book> getComponentType() { Book }
    MimeType[] getMimeTypes() { [ MimeType.XML] as MimeType[] }
    void render(List object, RenderContext context) {
        ....
    }
}

10.11.3 Using GSP to Customize Rendering

You can also customize rendering on a per action basis using Groovy Server Pages (GSP). For example given the show action mentioned previously:

def show(Book book) {
    respond book
}

You could supply a show.xml.gsp file to customize the rendering of the XML:

<%@page contentType="application/xml"%>
<book id="${book.id}" title="${book.title}"/>

10.12 Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State

HATEOAS, an abbreviation for Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State, is a common pattern applied to REST architectures that uses hypermedia and linking to define the REST API.

Hypermedia (also called Mime or Media Types) are used to describe the state of a REST resource, and links tell clients how to transition to the next state. The format of the response is typically JSON or XML, although standard formats such as Atom and/or HAL are frequently used.

10.12.1 HAL Support

HAL is a standard exchange format commonly used when developing REST APIs that follow HATEOAS principals. An example HAL document representing a list of orders can be seen below:

{
    "_links": {
        "self": { "href": "/orders" },
        "next": { "href": "/orders?page=2" },
        "find": {
            "href": "/orders{?id}",
            "templated": true
        },
        "admin": [{
            "href": "/admins/2",
            "title": "Fred"
        }, {
            "href": "/admins/5",
            "title": "Kate"
        }]
    },
    "currentlyProcessing": 14,
    "shippedToday": 20,
    "_embedded": {
        "order": [{
            "_links": {
                "self": { "href": "/orders/123" },
                "basket": { "href": "/baskets/98712" },
                "customer": { "href": "/customers/7809" }
            },
            "total": 30.00,
            "currency": "USD",
            "status": "shipped"
        }, {
            "_links": {
                "self": { "href": "/orders/124" },
                "basket": { "href": "/baskets/97213" },
                "customer": { "href": "/customers/12369" }
            },
            "total": 20.00,
            "currency": "USD",
            "status": "processing"
        }]
    }
}

Exposing Resources Using HAL

To return HAL instead of regular JSON for a resource you can simply override the renderer in grails-app/conf/spring/resources.groovy with an instance of grails.rest.render.hal.HalJsonRenderer (or HalXmlRenderer for the XML variation):

import grails.rest.render.hal.*
beans = {
    halBookRenderer(HalJsonRenderer, rest.test.Book)
}

You will also need to update the acceptable response formats for the resource so that the HAL format is included. Not doing so will result in a 406 - Not Acceptable response being returned from the server.

This can be done by setting the formats attribute of the Resource transformation:

import grails.rest.*

@Resource(uri='/books', formats=['json', 'xml', 'hal'])
class Book {
    ...
}

Or by updating the responseFormats in the controller:

class BookController extends RestfulController {
    static responseFormats = ['json', 'xml', 'hal']

    // ...
}

With the bean in place requesting the HAL content type will return HAL:

$ curl -i -H "Accept: application/hal+json" http://localhost:8080/books/1

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
Content-Type: application/hal+json;charset=ISO-8859-1

{
  "_links": {
    "self": {
      "href": "http://localhost:8080/books/1",
      "hreflang": "en",
      "type": "application/hal+json"
    }
  },
  "title": "\"The Stand\""
}

To use HAL XML format simply change the renderer:

import grails.rest.render.hal.*
beans = {
    halBookRenderer(HalXmlRenderer, rest.test.Book)
}

Rendering Collections Using HAL

To return HAL instead of regular JSON for a list of resources you can simply override the renderer in grails-app/conf/spring/resources.groovy with an instance of grails.rest.render.hal.HalJsonCollectionRenderer:

import grails.rest.render.hal.*
beans = {
    halBookCollectionRenderer(HalJsonCollectionRenderer, rest.test.Book)
}

With the bean in place requesting the HAL content type will return HAL:

$ curl -i -H "Accept: application/hal+json" http://localhost:8080/books
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
Content-Type: application/hal+json;charset=UTF-8
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Date: Thu, 17 Oct 2013 02:34:14 GMT

{
  "_links": {
    "self": {
      "href": "http://localhost:8080/books",
      "hreflang": "en",
      "type": "application/hal+json"
    }
  },
  "_embedded": {
    "book": [
      {
        "_links": {
          "self": {
            "href": "http://localhost:8080/books/1",
            "hreflang": "en",
            "type": "application/hal+json"
          }
        },
        "title": "The Stand"
      },
      {
        "_links": {
          "self": {
            "href": "http://localhost:8080/books/2",
            "hreflang": "en",
            "type": "application/hal+json"
          }
        },
        "title": "Infinite Jest"
      },
      {
        "_links": {
          "self": {
            "href": "http://localhost:8080/books/3",
            "hreflang": "en",
            "type": "application/hal+json"
          }
        },
        "title": "Walden"
      }
    ]
  }
}

Notice that the key associated with the list of Book objects in the rendered JSON is book which is derived from the type of objects in the collection, namely Book. In order to customize the value of this key assign a value to the collectionName property on the HalJsonCollectionRenderer bean as shown below:

import grails.rest.render.hal.*
beans = {
    halBookCollectionRenderer(HalCollectionJsonRenderer, rest.test.Book) {
        collectionName = 'publications'
    }
}

With that in place the rendered HAL will look like the following:

$ curl -i -H "Accept: application/hal+json" http://localhost:8080/books
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
Content-Type: application/hal+json;charset=UTF-8
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Date: Thu, 17 Oct 2013 02:34:14 GMT

{
  "_links": {
    "self": {
      "href": "http://localhost:8080/books",
      "hreflang": "en",
      "type": "application/hal+json"
    }
  },
  "_embedded": {
    "publications": [
      {
        "_links": {
          "self": {
            "href": "http://localhost:8080/books/1",
            "hreflang": "en",
            "type": "application/hal+json"
          }
        },
        "title": "The Stand"
      },
      {
        "_links": {
          "self": {
            "href": "http://localhost:8080/books/2",
            "hreflang": "en",
            "type": "application/hal+json"
          }
        },
        "title": "Infinite Jest"
      },
      {
        "_links": {
          "self": {
            "href": "http://localhost:8080/books/3",
            "hreflang": "en",
            "type": "application/hal+json"
          }
        },
        "title": "Walden"
      }
    ]
  }
}

Using Custom Media / Mime Types

If you wish to use a custom Mime Type then you first need to declare the Mime Types in grails-app/conf/application.groovy:

grails.mime.types = [
    all:      "*/*",
    book:     "application/vnd.books.org.book+json",
    bookList: "application/vnd.books.org.booklist+json",
    ...
]
It is critical that place your new mime types after the 'all' Mime Type because if the Content Type of the request cannot be established then the first entry in the map is used for the response. If you have your new Mime Type at the top then Grails will always try and send back your new Mime Type if the requested Mime Type cannot be established.

Then override the renderer to return HAL using the custom Mime Types:

import grails.rest.render.hal.*
import grails.web.mime.*

beans = {
    halBookRenderer(HalJsonRenderer, rest.test.Book, new MimeType("application/vnd.books.org.book+json", [v:"1.0"]))
    halBookListRenderer(HalJsonCollectionRenderer, rest.test.Book, new MimeType("application/vnd.books.org.booklist+json", [v:"1.0"]))
}

In the above example the first bean defines a HAL renderer for a single book instance that returns a Mime Type of application/vnd.books.org.book+json. The second bean defines the Mime Type used to render a collection of books (in this case application/vnd.books.org.booklist+json).

application/vnd.books.org.booklist+json is an example of a media-range (http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616.html - Header Field Definitions). This example uses entity (book) and operation (list) to form the media-range values but in reality, it may not be necessary to create a separate Mime type for each operation. Further, it may not be necessary to create Mime types at the entity level. See the section on "Versioning REST resources" for further information about how to define your own Mime types.

With this in place issuing a request for the new Mime Type returns the necessary HAL:

$ curl -i -H "Accept: application/vnd.books.org.book+json" http://localhost:8080/books/1

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
Content-Type: application/vnd.books.org.book+json;charset=ISO-8859-1

{
  "_links": {
    "self": {
      "href": "http://localhost:8080/books/1",
      "hreflang": "en",
      "type": "application/vnd.books.org.book+json"
    }
  },
  "title": "\"The Stand\""
}

An important aspect of HATEOAS is the usage of links that describe the transitions the client can use to interact with the REST API. By default the HalJsonRenderer will automatically create links for you for associations and to the resource itself (using the "self" relationship).

However you can customize link rendering using the link method that is added to all domain classes annotated with grails.rest.Resource or any class annotated with grails.rest.Linkable. For example, the show action can be modified as follows to provide a new link in the resulting output:

def show(Book book) {
    book.link rel:'publisher', href: g.createLink(absolute: true, resource:"publisher", params:[bookId: book.id])
    respond book
}

Which will result in output such as:

{
  "_links": {
    "self": {
      "href": "http://localhost:8080/books/1",
      "hreflang": "en",
      "type": "application/vnd.books.org.book+json"
    }
    "publisher": {
        "href": "http://localhost:8080/books/1/publisher",
        "hreflang": "en"
    }
  },
  "title": "\"The Stand\""
}

The link method can be passed named arguments that match the properties of the grails.rest.Link class.

10.12.2 Atom Support

Atom is another standard interchange format used to implement REST APIs. An example of Atom output can be seen below:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">

 <title>Example Feed</title>
 <link href="http://example.org/"/>
 <updated>2003-12-13T18:30:02Z</updated>
 <author>
   <name>John Doe</name>
 </author>
 <id>urn:uuid:60a76c80-d399-11d9-b93C-0003939e0af6</id>

 <entry>
   <title>Atom-Powered Robots Run Amok</title>
   <link href="http://example.org/2003/12/13/atom03"/>
   <id>urn:uuid:1225c695-cfb8-4ebb-aaaa-80da344efa6a</id>
   <updated>2003-12-13T18:30:02Z</updated>
   <summary>Some text.</summary>
 </entry>

</feed>

To use Atom rendering again simply define a custom renderer:

import grails.rest.render.atom.*
beans = {
    halBookRenderer(AtomRenderer, rest.test.Book)
    halBookListRenderer(AtomCollectionRenderer, rest.test.Book)
}

10.12.3 Vnd.Error Support

Vnd.Error is a standardised way of expressing an error response.

By default when a validation error occurs when attempting to POST new resources then the errors object will be sent back allow with a 422 respond code:

$ curl -i -H "Accept: application/json"  -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST -d "" http://localhost:8080/books

HTTP/1.1 422 Unprocessable Entity
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
Content-Type: application/json;charset=ISO-8859-1

{
  "errors": [
    {
      "object": "rest.test.Book",
      "field": "title",
      "rejected-value": null,
      "message": "Property [title] of class [class rest.test.Book] cannot be null"
    }
  ]
}

If you wish to change the format to Vnd.Error then simply register grails.rest.render.errors.VndErrorJsonRenderer bean in grails-app/conf/spring/resources.groovy:

beans = {
    vndJsonErrorRenderer(grails.rest.render.errors.VndErrorJsonRenderer)
    // for Vnd.Error XML format
    vndXmlErrorRenderer(grails.rest.render.errors.VndErrorXmlRenderer)
}

Then if you alter the client request to accept Vnd.Error you get an appropriate response:

$ curl -i -H "Accept: application/vnd.error+json,application/json" -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST -d "" http://localhost:8080/books
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
Content-Type: application/vnd.error+json;charset=ISO-8859-1

[
    {
        "logref": "book.nullable,
        "message": "Property [title] of class [class rest.test.Book] cannot be null",
        "_links": {
            "resource": {
                "href": "http://localhost:8080/rest-test/books"
            }
        }
    }
]

10.13 Customizing Binding of Resources

The framework provides a sophisticated but simple mechanism for binding REST requests to domain objects and command objects. One way to take advantage of this is to bind the request property in a controller the properties of a domain class. Given the following XML as the body of the request, the createBook action will create a new Book and assign "The Stand" to the title property and "Stephen King" to the authorName property.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<book>
    <title>The Stand</title>
    <authorName>Stephen King</authorName>
</book>
class BookController {

    def createBook() {
        def book = new Book()
        book.properties = request

        // ...
    }
}

Command objects will automatically be bound with the body of the request:

class BookController {
    def createBook(BookCommand book) {

        // ...
    }
}

class BookCommand {
    String title
    String authorName
}

If the command object type is a domain class and the root element of the XML document contains an id attribute, the id value will be used to retrieve the corresponding persistent instance from the database and then the rest of the document will be bound to the instance. If no corresponding record is found in the database, the command object reference will be null.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<book id="42">
    <title>Walden</title>
    <authorName>Henry David Thoreau</authorName>
</book>
class BookController {
    def updateBook(Book book) {
        // The book will have been retrieved from the database and updated
        // by doing something like this:
        //
        // book == Book.get('42')
        // if(book != null) {
        //    book.properties = request
        // }
        //
        // the code above represents what the framework will
        // have done. There is no need to write that code.

        // ...

    }
}

The data binding depends on an instance of the DataBindingSource interface created by an instance of the DataBindingSourceCreator interface. The specific implementation of DataBindingSourceCreator will be selected based on the contentType of the request. Several implementations are provided to handle common content types. The default implementations will be fine for most use cases. The following table lists the content types which are supported by the core framework and which DataBindingSourceCreator implementations are used for each. All of the implementation classes are in the org.grails.databinding.bindingsource package.

Content Type(s) Bean Name DataBindingSourceCreator Impl.

application/xml, text/xml

xmlDataBindingSourceCreator

XmlDataBindingSourceCreator

application/json, text/json

jsonDataBindingSourceCreator

JsonDataBindingSourceCreator

application/hal+json

halJsonDataBindingSourceCreator

HalJsonDataBindingSourceCreator

application/hal+xml

halXmlDataBindingSourceCreator

HalXmlDataBindingSourceCreator

In order to provide your own DataBindingSourceCreator for any of those content types, write a class which implements DataBindingSourceCreator and register an instance of that class in the Spring application context. If you are replacing one of the existing helpers, use the corresponding bean name from above. If you are providing a helper for a content type other than those accounted for by the core framework, the bean name may be anything that you like but you should take care not to conflict with one of the bean names above.

The DataBindingSourceCreator interface defines just 2 methods:

package org.grails.databinding.bindingsource

import grails.web.mime.MimeType
import grails.databinding.DataBindingSource

/**
 * A factory for DataBindingSource instances
 *
 * @since 2.3
 * @see DataBindingSourceRegistry
 * @see DataBindingSource
 *
 */
interface DataBindingSourceCreator {

    /**
     * `return All of the {`link MimeType} supported by this helper
     */
    MimeType[] getMimeTypes()

    /**
     * Creates a DataBindingSource suitable for binding bindingSource to bindingTarget
     *
     * @param mimeType a mime type
     * @param bindingTarget the target of the data binding
     * @param bindingSource the value being bound
     * @return a DataBindingSource
     */
    DataBindingSource createDataBindingSource(MimeType mimeType, Object bindingTarget, Object bindingSource)
}

AbstractRequestBodyDataBindingSourceCreator is an abstract class designed to be extended to simplify writing custom DataBindingSourceCreator classes. Classes which extend AbstractRequestbodyDatabindingSourceCreator need to implement a method named createBindingSource which accepts an InputStream as an argument and returns a DataBindingSource as well as implementing the getMimeTypes method described in the DataBindingSourceCreator interface above. The InputStream argument to createBindingSource provides access to the body of the request.

The code below shows a simple implementation.

src/main/groovy/com/demo/myapp/databinding/MyCustomDataBindingSourceCreator.groovy
package com.demo.myapp.databinding

import grails.web.mime.MimeType
import grails.databinding.DataBindingSource
import org...databinding.SimpleMapDataBindingSource
import org...databinding.bindingsource.AbstractRequestBodyDataBindingSourceCreator

/**
 * A custom DataBindingSourceCreator capable of parsing key value pairs out of
 * a request body containing a comma separated list of key:value pairs like:
 *
 * name:Herman,age:99,town:STL
 *
 */
class MyCustomDataBindingSourceCreator extends AbstractRequestBodyDataBindingSourceCreator {

    @Override
    public MimeType[] getMimeTypes() {
        [new MimeType('text/custom+demo+csv')] as MimeType[]
    }

    @Override
    protected DataBindingSource createBindingSource(InputStream inputStream) {
        def map = [:]

        def reader = new InputStreamReader(inputStream)

        // this is an obviously naive parser and is intended
        // for demonstration purposes only.

        reader.eachLine { line ->
            def keyValuePairs = line.split(',')
            keyValuePairs.each { keyValuePair ->
                if(keyValuePair?.trim()) {
                    def keyValuePieces = keyValuePair.split(':')
                    def key = keyValuePieces[0].trim()
                    def value = keyValuePieces[1].trim()
                    map<<key>> = value
                }
            }
        }

        // create and return a DataBindingSource which contains the parsed data
        new SimpleMapDataBindingSource(map)
    }
}

An instance of MyCustomDataSourceCreator needs to be registered in the spring application context.

grails-app/conf/spring/resources.groovy
beans = {

    myCustomCreator com.demo.myapp.databinding.MyCustomDataBindingSourceCreator

    // ...
}

With that in place the framework will use the myCustomCreator bean any time a DataBindingSourceCreator is needed to deal with a request which has a contentType of "text/custom+demo+csv".

10.14 RSS and Atom

No direct support is provided for RSS or Atom within Grails. You could construct RSS or ATOM feeds with the render method’s XML capability.

11 Asynchronous Programming

With modern hardware featuring multiple cores, many programming languages have been adding asynchronous, parallel programming APIs, Groovy being no exception.

Popular asynchronous libraries include:

By building on top of these various libraries the Async features of Grails aim to simplify concurrent programming within the framework, include the concept of Promises, and a unified event model.

In general, since the Reactive programming model is an evolving space, Grails tries to provide generic support for integrating a range of asynchronous libraries and doesn’t recommend any single library as they all have various advantages and disadvantages.

For more information on Asynchronous programming with Grails see the user guide for the Grails Asynchronous Framework.

12 Validation

Grails validation capability is built on Spring’s Validator API and data binding capabilities. However Grails takes this further and provides a unified way to define validation "constraints" with its constraints mechanism.

Constraints in Grails are a way to declaratively specify validation rules. Most commonly they are applied to domain classes, however URL Mappings and Command Objects also support constraints.

12.1 Declaring Constraints

Within a domain class constraints are defined with the constraints property that is assigned a code block:

class User {
    String login
    String password
    String email
    Integer age

    static constraints = {
      ...
    }
}

You then use method calls that match the property name for which the constraint applies in combination with named parameters to specify constraints:

class User {
    ...

    static constraints = {
        login size: 5..15, blank: false, unique: true
        password size: 5..15, blank: false
        email email: true, blank: false
        age min: 18
    }
}

In this example we’ve declared that the login property must be between 5 and 15 characters long, it cannot be blank and must be unique. We’ve also applied other constraints to the password, email and age properties.

By default, all domain class properties are not nullable (i.e. they have an implicit nullable: false constraint).

A complete reference for the available constraints can be found in the Quick Reference section under the Constraints heading.

Note that constraints are only evaluated once which may be relevant for a constraint that relies on a value like an instance of java.util.Date.

class User {
    ...

    static constraints = {
        // this Date object is created when the constraints are evaluated, not
        // each time an instance of the User class is validated.
        birthDate max: new Date()
    }
}

A word of warning - referencing domain class properties from constraints

It’s very easy to attempt to reference instance variables from the static constraints block, but this isn’t legal in Groovy (or Java). If you do so, you will get a MissingPropertyException for your trouble. For example, you may try

class Response {
    Survey survey
    Answer answer

    static constraints = {
        survey blank: false
        answer blank: false, inList: survey.answers
    }
}

See how the inList constraint references the instance property survey? That won’t work. Instead, use a custom validator:

class Response {
    ...
    static constraints = {
        survey blank: false
        answer blank: false, validator: { val, obj -> val in obj.survey.answers }
    }
}

In this example, the obj argument to the custom validator is the domain instance that is being validated, so we can access its survey property and return a boolean to indicate whether the new value for the answer property, val, is valid.

12.2 Validating Constraints

Validation Basics

Call the validate method to validate a domain class instance:

def user = new User(params)

if (user.validate()) {
    // do something with user
}
else {
    user.errors.allErrors.each {
        println it
    }
}

The errors property on domain classes is an instance of the Spring Errors interface. The Errors interface provides methods to navigate the validation errors and also retrieve the original values.

Validation Phases

Within Grails there are two phases of validation, the first one being data binding which occurs when you bind request parameters onto an instance such as:

def user = new User(params)

At this point you may already have errors in the errors property due to type conversion (such as converting Strings to Dates). You can check these and obtain the original input value using the Errors API:

if (user.hasErrors()) {
    if (user.errors.hasFieldErrors("login")) {
        println user.errors.getFieldError("login").rejectedValue
    }
}

The second phase of validation happens when you call validate or save. This is when Grails will validate the bound values against the constraints you defined. For example, by default the save method calls validate before executing, allowing you to write code like:

if (user.save()) {
    return user
}
else {
    user.errors.allErrors.each {
        println it
    }
}

12.3 Sharing Constraints Between Classes

A common pattern in Grails is to use Command Objects for validating user-submitted data and then copy the properties of the command object to the relevant domain classes. This often means that your command objects and domain classes share properties and their constraints. You could manually copy and paste the constraints between the two, but that’s a very error-prone approach. Instead, make use of Grails' global constraints and import mechanism.

Global Constraints

In addition to defining constraints in domain classes, command objects and other validateable classes, you can also define them in grails-app/conf/runtime.groovy:

grails.gorm.default.constraints = {
    '*'(nullable: true, size: 1..20)
    myShared(nullable: false, blank: false)
}

These constraints are not attached to any particular classes, but they can be easily referenced from any validateable class:

class User {
    ...

    static constraints = {
        login shared: "myShared"
    }
}

Note the use of the shared argument, whose value is the name of one of the constraints defined in grails.gorm.default.constraints. Despite the name of the configuration setting, you can reference these shared constraints from any validateable class, such as command objects.

The '*' constraint is a special case: it means that the associated constraints ('nullable' and 'size' in the above example) will be applied to all properties in all validateable classes. These defaults can be overridden by the constraints declared in a validateable class.

Importing Constraints

Grails 2 introduced an alternative approach to sharing constraints that allows you to import a set of constraints from one class into another.

Let’s say you have a domain class like so:

class User {
    String firstName
    String lastName
    String passwordHash

    static constraints = {
        firstName blank: false, nullable: false
        lastName blank: false, nullable: false
        passwordHash blank: false, nullable: false
    }
}

You then want to create a command object, UserCommand, that shares some of the properties of the domain class and the corresponding constraints. You do this with the importFrom() method:

class UserCommand {
    String firstName
    String lastName
    String password
    String confirmPassword

    static constraints = {
        importFrom User

        password blank: false, nullable: false
        confirmPassword blank: false, nullable: false
    }
}

This will import all the constraints from the User domain class and apply them to UserCommand. The import will ignore any constraints in the source class (User) that don’t have corresponding properties in the importing class (UserCommand). In the above example, only the 'firstName' and 'lastName' constraints will be imported into UserCommand because those are the only properties shared by the two classes.

If you want more control over which constraints are imported, use the include and exclude arguments. Both of these accept a list of simple or regular expression strings that are matched against the property names in the source constraints. So for example, if you only wanted to import the 'lastName' constraint you would use:

...
static constraints = {
    importFrom User, include: ["lastName"]
    ...
}

or if you wanted all constraints that ended with 'Name':

...
static constraints = {
    importFrom User, include: [/.*Name/]
    ...
}

Of course, exclude does the reverse, specifying which constraints should not be imported.

12.4 Validation on the Client

Displaying Errors

Typically if you get a validation error you redirect back to the view for rendering. Once there you need some way of displaying errors. Grails supports a rich set of tags for dealing with errors. To render the errors as a list you can use renderErrors:

<g:renderErrors bean="${user}" />

If you need more control you can use hasErrors and eachError:

<g:hasErrors bean="${user}">
  <ul>
   <g:eachError var="err" bean="${user}">
       <li>${err}</li>
   </g:eachError>
  </ul>
</g:hasErrors>

Highlighting Errors

It is often useful to highlight using a red box or some indicator when a field has been incorrectly input. This can also be done with the hasErrors by invoking it as a method. For example:

<div class='value ${hasErrors(bean:user,field:'login','errors')}'>
   <input type="text" name="login" value="${fieldValue(bean:user,field:'login')}"/>
</div>

This code checks if the login field of the user bean has any errors and if so it adds an errors CSS class to the div, allowing you to use CSS rules to highlight the div.

Retrieving Input Values

Each error is actually an instance of the FieldError class in Spring, which retains the original input value within it. This is useful as you can use the error object to restore the value input by the user using the fieldValue tag:

<input type="text" name="login" value="${fieldValue(bean:user,field:'login')}"/>

This code will check for an existing FieldError in the User bean and if there is obtain the originally input value for the login field.

12.5 Validation and Internationalization

Another important thing to note about errors in Grails is that error messages are not hard coded anywhere. The FieldError class in Spring resolves messages from message bundles using Grails' i18n support.

Constraints and Message Codes

The codes themselves are dictated by a convention. For example consider the constraints we looked at earlier:

package com.mycompany.myapp

class User {
    ...

    static constraints = {
        login size: 5..15, blank: false, unique: true
        password size: 5..15, blank: false
        email email: true, blank: false
        age min: 18
    }
}

If a constraint is violated, Grails looks by convention for a message code:

Constraint Error Code

blank

className.propertyName.blank

creditCard

className.propertyName.creditCard.invalid

email

className.propertyName.email.invalid

inList

className.propertyName.not.inList

matches

className.propertyName.matches.invalid

max

className.propertyName.max.exceeded

maxSize

className.propertyName.maxSize.exceeded

min

className.propertyName.min.notmet

minSize

className.propertyName.minSize.notmet

notEqual

className.propertyName.notEqual

nullable

className.propertyName.nullable

range

className.propertyName.range.toosmall or className.propertyName.range.toobig

size

className.propertyName.size.toosmall or className.propertyName.size.toobig

unique

className.propertyName.unique

url

className.propertyName.url.invalid

validator

classname.propertyName. + String returned by Closure

In the case of the blank constraint this would be user.login.blank so you would need a message such as the following in your grails-app/i18n/messages.properties file:

user.login.blank=Your login name must be specified!

The class name is looked for both with and without a package, with the packaged version taking precedence. So for example, com.mycompany.myapp.User.login.blank will be used before user.login.blank. This allows for cases where your domain class message codes clash with a plugin’s.

For a reference on what codes are for which constraints refer to the reference guide for each constraint (e.g. blank).

Displaying Messages

The renderErrors tag will automatically look up messages for you using the message tag. If you need more control of rendering you can handle this yourself:

<g:hasErrors bean="${user}">
  <ul>
   <g:eachError var="err" bean="${user}">
       <li><g:message error="${err}" /></li>
   </g:eachError>
  </ul>
</g:hasErrors>

In this example within the body of the eachError tag we use the message tag in combination with its error argument to read the message for the given error.

12.6 Applying Validation to Other Classes

Domain classes and Command Objects support validation by default. Other classes may be made validateable by defining the static constraints property in the class (as described above) and then telling the framework about them. It is important that the application register the validateable classes with the framework. Simply defining the constraints property is not sufficient.

The Validateable Trait

Classes which define the static constraints property and implement the Validateable trait will be validateable. Consider this example:

src/main/groovy/com/mycompany/myapp/User.groovy
package com.mycompany.myapp

import grails.validation.Validateable

class User implements Validateable {
    ...

    static constraints = {
        login size: 5..15, blank: false, unique: true
        password size: 5..15, blank: false
        email email: true, blank: false
        age min: 18
    }
}
Programmatic access

Accessing the constraints on a validateable object is slightly different. You can access a command object’s constraints programmatically in another context by accessing the constraintsMap static property of the class. That property is an instance of Map<String, ConstrainedProperty>

In the example above, accessing User.constraintsMap.login.blank would yield false, while User.constraintsMap.login.unique would yield true.

13 The Service Layer

Grails defines the notion of a service layer. The Grails team discourages the embedding of core application logic inside controllers, as it does not promote reuse and a clean separation of concerns.

Services in Grails are the place to put the majority of the logic in your application, leaving controllers responsible for handling request flow with redirects and so on.

Creating a Service

You can create a Grails service by running the create-service command from the root of your project in a terminal window:

grails create-service helloworld.simple
If no package is specified with the create-service script, Grails automatically uses the grails.defaultPackage defined in grails-app/conf/application.yml as the package name.

The above example will create a service at the location grails-app/services/helloworld/SimpleService.groovy. A service’s name ends with the convention Service, other than that a service is a plain Groovy class:

package helloworld

class SimpleService {
}

13.1 Declarative Transactions

Declarative Transactions

Services are typically involved with coordinating logic between domain classes, and hence often involved with persistence that spans large operations. Given the nature of services, they frequently require transactional behaviour. You can use programmatic transactions with the withTransaction method, however this is repetitive and doesn’t fully leverage the power of Spring’s underlying transaction abstraction.

Services enable transaction demarcation, which is a declarative way of defining which methods are to be made transactional. To enable transactions on a service use the Transactional transform:

import grails.gorm.transactions.*

@Transactional
class CountryService {

}

The result is that all methods are wrapped in a transaction and automatic rollback occurs if a method throws an exception (both Checked or Runtime exceptions) or an Error. The propagation level of the transaction is by default set to PROPAGATION_REQUIRED.

Version Grails 3.2.0 was the first version to use GORM 6 by default. Checked exceptions did not roll back transactions before GORM 6. Only a method which threw a runtime exception (i.e. one that extends RuntimeException) rollbacked a transaction.
Warning: dependency injection is the only way that declarative transactions work. You will not get a transactional service if you use the new operator such as new BookService()

The Transactional annotation vs the transactional property

In versions of Grails prior to Grails 3.1, Grails created Spring proxies and used the transactional property to enable and disable proxy creation. These proxies are disabled by default in applications created with Grails 3.1 and above in favor of the @Transactional transformation.

For versions of Grails 3.1.x and 3.2.x, if you wish to renable this feature (not recommended) then you must set grails.spring.transactionManagement to true or remove the configuration in grails-app/conf/application.yml or grails-app/conf/application.groovy.

In Grails 3.3.x Spring proxies for transaction management has been dropped completely, and you must use Grails' AST transforms. In Grails 3.3.x, if you wish to continue to use Spring proxies for transaction management you will have to configure them manually, using the appropriate Spring configuration.

In addition, prior to Grails 3.1 services were transactional by default, as of Grails 3.1 they are only transactional if the @Transactional transformation is applied.

Custom Transaction Configuration

Grails also provides @Transactional and @NotTransactional annotations for cases where you need more fine-grained control over transactions at a per-method level or need to specify an alternative propagation level. For example, the @NotTransactional annotation can be used to mark a particular method to be skipped when a class is annotated with @Transactional.

Annotating a service method with Transactional disables the default Grails transactional behavior for that service (in the same way that adding transactional=false does) so if you use any annotations you must annotate all methods that require transactions.

In this example listBooks uses a read-only transaction, updateBook uses a default read-write transaction, and deleteBook is not transactional (probably not a good idea given its name).

import grails.gorm.transactions.Transactional

class BookService {

    @Transactional(readOnly = true)
    def listBooks() {
        Book.list()
    }

    @Transactional
    def updateBook() {
        // ...
    }

    def deleteBook() {
        // ...
    }
}

You can also annotate the class to define the default transaction behavior for the whole service, and then override that default per-method:

import grails.gorm.transactions.Transactional

@Transactional
class BookService {

    def listBooks() {
        Book.list()
    }

    def updateBook() {
        // ...
    }

    def deleteBook() {
        // ...
    }
}

This version defaults to all methods being read-write transactional (due to the class-level annotation), but the listBooks method overrides this to use a read-only transaction:

import grails.gorm.transactions.Transactional

@Transactional
class BookService {

    @Transactional(readOnly = true)
    def listBooks() {
        Book.list()
    }

    def updateBook() {
        // ...
    }

    def deleteBook() {
        // ...
    }
}

Although updateBook and deleteBook aren’t annotated in this example, they inherit the configuration from the class-level annotation.

For more information refer to the section of the Spring user guide on Using @Transactional.

Unlike Spring you do not need any prior configuration to use Transactional; just specify the annotation as needed and Grails will detect them up automatically.

Transaction status

An instance of TransactionStatus is available by default in Grails transactional service methods.

Example:

import grails.gorm.transactions.Transactional

@Transactional
class BookService {

    def deleteBook() {
        transactionStatus.setRollbackOnly()
    }
}

13.1.1 Transactions and Multi-DataSources

Given two domain classes such as:

class Movie {
    String title
}
class Book {
    String title

    static mapping = {
        datasource 'books'
    }
}

You can supply the desired data source to @Transactional or @ReadOnly annotations.

import grails.gorm.transactions.ReadOnly
import grails.gorm.transactions.Transactional
import groovy.transform.CompileStatic

@CompileStatic
class BookService {

    @ReadOnly('books')
    List<Book> findAll() {
        Book.where {}.findAll()
    }

    @Transactional('books')
    Book save(String title) {
        Book book = new Book(title: title)
        book.save()
        book
    }
}
@CompileStatic
class MovieService {

    @ReadOnly
    List<Movie> findAll() {
        Movie.where {}.findAll()
    }
}

13.1.2 Transactions Rollback and the Session

Understanding Transactions and the Hibernate Session

When using transactions there are important considerations you must take into account with regards to how the underlying persistence session is handled by Hibernate. When a transaction is rolled back the Hibernate session used by GORM is cleared. This means any objects within the session become detached and accessing uninitialized lazy-loaded collections will lead to a LazyInitializationException.

To understand why it is important that the Hibernate session is cleared. Consider the following example:

class Author {
    String name
    Integer age

    static hasMany = [books: Book]
}

If you were to save two authors using consecutive transactions as follows:

Author.withTransaction { status ->
    new Author(name: "Stephen King", age: 40).save()
    status.setRollbackOnly()
}

Author.withTransaction { status ->
    new Author(name: "Stephen King", age: 40).save()
}

Only the second author would be saved since the first transaction rolls back the author save() by clearing the Hibernate session. If the Hibernate session were not cleared then both author instances would be persisted and it would lead to very unexpected results.

It can, however, be frustrating to get a LazyInitializationException due to the session being cleared.

For example, consider the following example:

class AuthorService {

    void updateAge(id, int age) {
        def author = Author.get(id)
        author.age = age
        if (author.isTooOld()) {
            throw new AuthorException("too old", author)
        }
    }
}
class AuthorController {

    def authorService

    def updateAge() {
        try {
            authorService.updateAge(params.id, params.int("age"))
        }
        catch(e) {
            render "Author books ${e.author.books}"
        }
    }
}

In the above example the transaction will be rolled back if the age of the Author age exceeds the maximum value defined in the isTooOld() method by throwing an AuthorException. The AuthorException references the author but when the books association is accessed a LazyInitializationException will be thrown because the underlying Hibernate session has been cleared.

To solve this problem you have a number of options. One is to ensure you query eagerly to get the data you will need:

class AuthorService {
    ...
    void updateAge(id, int age) {
        def author = Author.findById(id, [fetch:[books:"eager"]])
        ...

In this example the books association will be queried when retrieving the Author.

This is the optimal solution as it requires fewer queries than the following suggested solutions.

Another solution is to redirect the request after a transaction rollback:

class AuthorController {

    AuthorService authorService

    def updateAge() {
        try {
            authorService.updateAge(params.id, params.int("age"))
        }
        catch(e) {
            flash.message = "Can't update age"
            redirect action:"show", id:params.id
        }
    }
}

In this case a new request will deal with retrieving the Author again. And, finally a third solution is to retrieve the data for the Author again to make sure the session remains in the correct state:

class AuthorController {

    def authorService

    def updateAge() {
        try {
            authorService.updateAge(params.id, params.int("age"))
        }
        catch(e) {
            def author = Author.read(params.id)
            render "Author books ${author.books}"
        }
    }
}

Validation Errors and Rollback

A common use case is to rollback a transaction if there are validation errors. For example consider this service:

import grails.validation.ValidationException

class AuthorService {

    void updateAge(id, int age) {
        def author = Author.get(id)
        author.age = age
        if (!author.validate()) {
            throw new ValidationException("Author is not valid", author.errors)
        }
    }
}

To re-render the same view that a transaction was rolled back in you can re-associate the errors with a refreshed instance before rendering:

import grails.validation.ValidationException

class AuthorController {

    def authorService

    def updateAge() {
        try {
            authorService.updateAge(params.id, params.int("age"))
        }
        catch (ValidationException e) {
            def author = Author.read(params.id)
            author.errors = e.errors
            render view: "edit", model: [author:author]
        }
    }
}

13.2 Scoped Services

By default, access to service methods is not synchronised, so nothing prevents concurrent execution of those methods. In fact, because the service is a singleton and may be used concurrently, you should be very careful about storing state in a service. Or take the easy (and better) road and never store state in a service.

You can change this behaviour by placing a service in a particular scope. The supported scopes are:

  • prototype - A new service is created every time it is injected into another class

  • request - A new service will be created per request

  • flash - A new service will be created for the current and next request only

  • flow - In web flows the service will exist for the scope of the flow

  • conversation - In web flows the service will exist for the scope of the conversation. ie a root flow and its sub flows

  • session - A service is created for the scope of a user session

  • singleton (default) - Only one instance of the service ever exists

If your service is flash, flow or conversation scoped it must implement java.io.Serializable and can only be used in the context of a Web Flow.

To enable one of the scopes, add a static scope property to your class whose value is one of the above, for example

static scope = "flow"
Upgrading

Starting with Grails 2.3, new applications are generated with configuration that defaults the scope of controllers to singleton. If singleton controllers interact with prototype scoped services, the services effectively behave as per-controller singletons. If non-singleton services are required, controller scope should be changed as well.

See Controllers and Scopes in the user guide for more information.

Lazy initialization

You can also configure whether the service is lazily initialized. By default, this is set to true, but you can disable this and make initialization eager with the lazyInit property:

static lazyInit = false

13.3 Dependency Injection and Services

Dependency Injection Basics

A key aspect of Grails services is the ability to use Spring Framework's dependency injection features. Grails supports "dependency injection by convention". In other words, you can use the property name representation of the class name of a service to automatically inject them into controllers, tag libraries, and so on.

As an example, given a service called BookService, if you define a property called bookService in a controller as follows:

class BookController {
    def bookService
    ...
}

In this case, the Spring container will automatically inject an instance of that service based on its configured scope. All dependency injection is done by name. You can also specify the type as follows:

class AuthorService {
    BookService bookService
}
NOTE: Normally the property name is generated by lower casing the first letter of the type. For example, an instance of the BookService class would map to a property named bookService.

To be consistent with standard JavaBean conventions, if the first 2 letters of the class name are upper case, the property name is the same as the class name. For example, the property name of the JDBCHelperService class would be JDBCHelperService, not jDBCHelperService or jdbcHelperService.

See section 8.8 of the JavaBean specification for more information on de-capitalization rules.

Only the top level object is subjected to injection as traversing all nested objects to perform injection would be a performance issue.

Be careful when injecting the non-default datasources. For example, using this config:

dataSources:
    dataSource:
        pooled: true
        jmxExport: true
        .....
    secondary:
        pooled: true
        jmxExport: true
        .....

You can inject the primary dataSource like you would expect:

class BookSqlService {

      def dataSource
}

But to inject the secondary datasource, you have to use Spring’s Autowired injection or resources.groovy.

class BookSqlSecondaryService {

  @Autowired
  @Qualifier('dataSource_secondary')
  def dataSource2
}

Dependency Injection and Services

You can inject services in other services with the same technique. If you had an AuthorService that needed to use the BookService, declaring the AuthorService as follows would allow that:

class AuthorService {
    def bookService
}

Dependency Injection and Domain Classes / Tag Libraries

You can even inject services into domain classes and tag libraries, which can aid in the development of rich domain models and views:

class Book {
    ...
    def bookService

    def buyBook() {
        bookService.buyBook(this)
    }
}
Since Grails 3.2.8 this is not enabled by default. If you want to enable it again, take a look at Spring Autowiring of Domain Instance

Service Bean Names

The default bean name which is associated with a service can be problematic if there are multiple services with the same name defined in different packages. For example consider the situation where an application defines a service class named com.demo.ReportingService and the application uses a plugin named ReportingUtilities and that plugin provides a service class named com.reporting.util.ReportingService.

The default bean name for each of those would be reportingService so they would conflict with each other. Grails manages this by changing the default bean name for services provided by plugins by prefixing the bean name with the plugin name.

In the scenario described above the reportingService bean would be an instance of the com.demo.ReportingService class defined in the application and the reportingUtilitiesReportingService bean would be an instance of the com.reporting.util.ReportingService class provided by the ReportingUtilities plugin.

For all service beans provided by plugins, if there are no other services with the same name within the application or other plugins in the application then a bean alias will be created which does not include the plugin name and that alias points to the bean referred to by the name that does include the plugin name prefix.

For example, if the ReportingUtilities plugin provides a service named com.reporting.util.AuthorService and there is no other AuthorService in the application or in any of the plugins that the application is using then there will be a bean named reportingUtilitiesAuthorService which is an instance of this com.reporting.util.AuthorService class and there will be a bean alias defined in the context named authorService which points to that same bean.

14 Static Type Checking And Compilation

Groovy is a dynamic language and by default Groovy uses a dynamic dispatch mechanism to carry out method calls and property access. This dynamic dispatch mechanism provides a lot of flexibility and power to the language. For example, it is possible to dynamically add methods to classes at runtime and it is possible to dynamically replace existing methods at runtime. Features like these are important and provide a lot of power to the language. However, there are times when you may want to disable this dynamic dispatch in favor of a more static dispatch mechanism and Groovy provides a way to do that. The way to tell the Groovy compiler that a particular class should compiled statically is to mark the class with the groovy.transform.CompileStatic annotation as shown below.

import groovy.transform.CompileStatic

@CompileStatic
class MyClass {

    // this class will be statically compiled...

}

See these notes on Groovy static compilation for more details on how CompileStatic works and why you might want to use it.

One limitation of using CompileStatic is that when you use it you give up access to the power and flexibility offered by dynamic dispatch. For example, in Grails you would not be able to invoke a GORM dynamic finder from a class that is marked with CompileStatic because the compiler cannot verify that the dynamic finder method exists, because it doesn’t exist at compile time. It may be that you want to take advantage of Groovy’s static compilation benefits without giving up access to dynamic dispatch for Grails specific things like dynamic finders and this is where grails.compiler.GrailsCompileStatic comes in. GrailsCompileStatic behaves just like CompileStatic but is aware of certain Grails features and allows access to those specific features to be accessed dynamically.

14.1 The GrailsCompileStatic Annotation

GrailsCompileStatic

The GrailsCompileStatic annotation may be applied to a class or methods within a class.

import grails.compiler.GrailsCompileStatic

@GrailsCompileStatic
class SomeClass {

    // all of the code in this class will be statically compiled

    def methodOne() {
        // ...
    }

    def methodTwo() {
        // ...
    }

    def methodThree() {
        // ...
    }
}
import grails.compiler.GrailsCompileStatic

class SomeClass {

    // methodOne and methodThree will be statically compiled
    // methodTwo will be dynamically compiled

    @GrailsCompileStatic
    def methodOne() {
        // ...
    }

    def methodTwo() {
        // ...
    }

    @GrailsCompileStatic
    def methodThree() {
        // ...
    }
}

It is possible to mark a class with GrailsCompileStatic and exclude specific methods by marking them with GrailsCompileStatic and specifying that the type checking should be skipped for that particular method as shown below.

import grails.compiler.GrailsCompileStatic
import groovy.transform.TypeCheckingMode

@GrailsCompileStatic
class SomeClass {

    // methodOne and methodThree will be statically compiled
    // methodTwo will be dynamically compiled

    def methodOne() {
        // ...
    }

    @GrailsCompileStatic(TypeCheckingMode.SKIP)
    def methodTwo() {
        // ...
    }

    def methodThree() {
        // ...
    }
}

Code that is marked with GrailsCompileStatic will all be statically compiled except for Grails specific interactions that cannot be statically compiled but that GrailsCompileStatic can identify as permissible for dynamic dispatch. These include things like invoking dynamic finders and DSL code in configuration blocks like constraints and mapping closures in domain classes.

Care must be taken when deciding to statically compile code. There are benefits associated with static compilation but in order to take advantage of those benefits you are giving up the power and flexibility of dynamic dispatch. For example if code is statically compiled it cannot take advantage of runtime metaprogramming enhancements which may be provided by plugins.

14.2 The GrailsTypeChecked Annotation

GrailsTypeChecked

The grails.compiler.GrailsTypeChecked annotation works a lot like the GrailsCompileStatic annotation except that it only enables static type checking, not static compilation. This affords compile time feedback for expressions which cannot be validated statically at compile time while still leaving dynamic dispatch in place for the class.

import grails.compiler.GrailsTypeChecked

@GrailsTypeChecked
class SomeClass {

    // all of the code in this class will be statically type
    // checked and will be dynamically dispatched at runtime

    def methodOne() {
        // ...
    }

    def methodTwo() {
        // ...
    }

    def methodThree() {
        // ...
    }
}

15 Testing

Automated testing is a key part of Grails. Hence, Grails provides many ways to making testing easier from low level unit testing to high level functional tests. This section details the different capabilities that Grails offers for testing.

The first thing to be aware of is that all of the create-* and generate-\* commands create unit or integration tests automatically. For example if you run the create-controller command as follows:

grails create-controller com.acme.app.simple

Grails will create a controller at grails-app/controllers/com/acme/app/SimpleController.groovy, and also a unit test at src/test/groovy/com/acme/app/SimpleControllerSpec.groovy. What Grails won’t do however is populate the logic inside the test! That is left up to you.

The default class name suffix is Tests but as of Grails 1.2.2, the suffix of Test is also supported.

Running Tests

Tests are run with the test-app command:

grails test-app

The command will produce output such as:

-------------------------------------------------------
Running Unit Tests...
Running test FooTests...FAILURE
Unit Tests Completed in 464ms ...
-------------------------------------------------------

Tests failed: 0 errors, 1 failures

whilst showing the reason for each test failure.

You can force a clean before running tests by passing -clean to the test-app command.

Grails writes HTML test reports to the build/reports/tests directory and JUnit XML test reports to the build/test-results directory. The HTML reports are generally the best ones to look at.

Using Grails' interactive mode confers some distinct advantages when executing tests. First, the tests will execute significantly faster on the second and subsequent runs. Second, a shortcut is available to open the HTML reports in your browser:

open test-report

You can also run your unit tests from within most IDEs.

Targeting Tests

You can selectively target the test(s) to be run in different ways. To run all tests for a controller named SimpleController you would run:

grails test-app SimpleController

This will run any tests for the class named SimpleController. Wildcards can be used…​

grails test-app *Controller

This will test all classes ending in Controller. Package names can optionally be specified…​

grails test-app some.org.*Controller

or to run all tests in a package…​

grails test-app some.org.*

or to run all tests in a package including subpackages…​

grails test-app some.org.**.*

You can also target particular test methods…​

grails test-app SimpleController.testLogin

This will run the testLogin test in the SimpleController tests. You can specify as many patterns in combination as you like…​

grails test-app some.org.* SimpleController.testLogin BookController
In Grails 2.x, adding -rerun as an argument would only run those tests which failed in the previous test-app run. This argument is no longer supported.
In Grails 3.x, you might need to specify the package name before the class name, as well as append "Spec" to the end. For example, if you want to run the test for the ProductController, you should use grails test-app *.ProductControllerSpec. Note that the star can be used if you don’t want to type the whole package hierarchy.

Debugging

In order to debug your tests via a remote debugger, you can add --debug-jvm after grails in any commands, like so:

grails --debug-jvm test-app

This will open the default Java remote debugging port, 5005, for you to attach a remote debugger from your editor / IDE of choice.

This differs from Grails 2.3 and previous, where the grails-debug command existed.

Targeting Test Phases

In addition to targeting certain tests, you can also target test phases. By default Grails has two testing phases unit and integration.

Grails 2.x uses phase:type syntax. In Grails 3.0 it was removed, because it made no sense in Gradle context.

To execute unit tests you can run:

grails test-app -unit

To run integration tests you would run…​

grails test-app -integration

Targeting Tests When Using Phases

Test and phase targeting can be applied at the same time:

grails test-app some.org.**.* -unit

This would run all tests in the unit phase that are in the package some.org or a subpackage.

15.1 Unit Testing

Unit testing are tests at the "unit" level. In other words you are testing individual methods or blocks of code without consideration for surrounding infrastructure. Unit tests are typically run without the presence of physical resources that involve I/O such as databases, socket connections or files. This is to ensure they run as quick as possible since quick feedback is important.

Since Grails 3.3, the Grails Testing Support Framework is used for all unit tests. This support provides a set of traits. An example hello world test can be seen below:

import spock.lang.Specification
import grails.testing.web.controllers.ControllerUnitTest

class HelloControllerTests extends Specification implements ControllerUnitTest<HelloController> {

    void "Test message action"() {
        when:"The message action is invoked"
        controller.message()

        then:"Hello is returned"
        response.text == 'Hello'
    }
}

For more information on writing tests with Grails Testing Support see the dedicated documentation.

Versions of Grails below 3.2 used the Grails Test Mixin Framework which was based on the @TestMixin AST transformation. This library has been superceded by the simpler and more IDE friendly trait based implementation.

15.2 Integration Testing

Integration tests differ from unit tests in that you have full access to the Grails environment within the test. You can create an integration test using the create-integration-test command:

$ grails create-integration-test Example

The above command will create a new integration test at the location src/integration-test/groovy/<PACKAGE>/ExampleSpec.groovy.

Grails uses the test environment for integration tests and loads the application prior to the first test run. All tests use the same application state.

Transactions

Integration test methods run inside their own database transaction by default, which is rolled back at the end of each test method. This means that data saved during a test is not persisted to the database (which is shared across all tests). The default generated integration test template includes the Rollback annotation:

import grails.testing.mixin.integration.Integration
import grails.gorm.transactions.*
import spock.lang.*

@Integration
@Rollback
class ExampleSpec extends Specification {

    ...

    void "test something"() {
        expect:"fix me"
            true == false
    }
}

The Rollback annotation ensures that each test method runs in a transaction that is rolled back. Generally this is desirable because you do not want your tests depending on order or application state.

In Grails 3.0 tests rely on grails.gorm.transactions.Rollback annotation to bind the session in integration tests. Though each test method transaction is rolled back, the setup() method uses a separate transaction that is not rolled back. Data will persist to the database and will need to be cleaned up manually if setup() sets up data and persists them as shown in the below sample:

import grails.testing.mixin.integration.Integration
import grails.gorm.transactions.*
import spock.lang.*

@Integration
@Rollback
class BookSpec extends Specification {

    void setup() {
        // Below line would persist and not roll back
        new Book(name: 'Grails in Action').save(flush: true)
    }

    void "test something"() {
        expect:
        Book.count() == 1
    }
}

To preload the database and automatically roll back setup logic, any persistence operations need to be called from the test method itself so that they can run within the test method’s rolled back transaction. Similar to usage of the setupData() method shown below which creates a record in database and after running other test will be rolled back:

import grails.testing.mixin.integration.Integration
import grails.gorm.transactions.*
import spock.lang.*

@Integration
@Rollback
class BookSpec extends Specification {

    void setupData() {
        // Below line would roll back
        new Book(name: 'Grails in Action').save(flush: true)
    }

    void "test something"() {
        given:
        setupData()

        expect:
        Book.count() == 1
    }
}

Using Spring’s Rollback annotation

Another transactional approach could be to use Spring’s @Rollback instead.

import grails.testing.mixin.integration.Integration
import org.springframework.test.annotation.Rollback
import spock.lang.*

@Integration
@Rollback
class BookSpec extends Specification {

    void setup() {
        new Book(name: 'Grails in Action').save(flush: true)
    }

    void "test something"() {
        expect:
        Book.count() == 1
    }
}
It isn’t possible to make grails.gorm.transactions.Rollback behave the same way as Spring’s Rollback annotation because grails.gorm.transactions.Rollback transforms the byte code of the class, eliminating the need for a proxy (which Spring’s version requires). This has the downside that you cannot implement it differently for different cases (as Spring does for testing).

DirtiesContext

If you do have a series of tests that will share state you can remove the Rollback and the last test in the suite should feature the DirtiesContext annotation which will shutdown the environment and restart it fresh (note that this will have an impact on test run times).

Autowiring

To obtain a reference to a bean you can use the Autowired annotation. For example:

...
import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.*

@Integration
@Rollback
class ExampleServiceSpec extends Specification {

    @Autowired
    ExampleService exampleService
    ...

    void "Test example service"() {
        expect:
            exampleService.countExamples() == 0
    }
}

Testing Controllers

To integration test controllers it is recommended you use create-functional-test command to create a Geb functional test. See the following section on functional testing for more information.

15.3 Functional Testing

Functional tests involve making HTTP requests against the running application and verifying the resultant behaviour. This is useful for end-to-end testing scenarios, such as making REST calls against a JSON API.

Grails by default ships with support for writing functional tests using the Geb framework. To create a functional test you can use the create-functional-test command which will create a new functional test:

$ grails create-functional-test MyFunctional

The above command will create a new Spock spec called MyFunctionalSpec.groovy in the src/integration-test/groovy directory. The test is annotated with the Integration annotation to indicate it is an integration test and extends the GebSpec super class:

@Integration
class HomeSpec extends GebSpec {

    def setup() {
    }

    def cleanup() {
    }

    void "Test the home page renders correctly"() {
        when:"The home page is visited"
            go '/'

        then:"The title is correct"
            $('title').text() == "Welcome to Grails"
    }
}

When the test is run the application container will be loaded up in the background and you can send requests to the running application using the Geb API.

Note that the application is only loaded once for the entire test run, so functional tests share the state of the application across the whole suite.

In addition the application is loaded in the JVM as the test, this means that the test has full access to the application state and can interact directly with data services such as GORM to setup and cleanup test data.

The Integration annotation supports an optional applicationClass attribute which may be used to specify the application class to use for the functional test. The class must extend GrailsAutoConfiguration.

@Integration(applicationClass=com.demo.Application)
class HomeSpec extends GebSpec {

    // ...

}

If the applicationClass is not specified then the test runtime environment will attempt to locate the application class dynamically which can be problematic in multiproject builds where multiple application classes may be present.

When running the server port by default will be randomly assigned. The Integration annotation adds a property of serverPort to the test class that you can use if you want to know what port the application is running on this isn’t needed if you are extending the GebSpec as shown above but can be useful information.

If you want to run the tests on a fixed port (defined by the server.port configuration property), you need to manually annotate your test with @SpringBootTest:

import grails.testing.mixin.integration.Integration
import org.springframework.boot.test.context.SpringBootTest
import spock.lang.Specification

@Integration
@SpringBootTest(webEnvironment = SpringBootTest.WebEnvironment.DEFINED_PORT)
class MySpec extends Specification {

    // ...

}

16 Internationalization

Grails supports Internationalization (i18n) out of the box by leveraging the underlying Spring MVC internationalization support. With Grails you are able to customize the text that appears in a view based on the user’s Locale. To quote the javadoc for the Locale class:

A Locale object represents a specific geographical, political, or cultural region. An operation that requires a Locale to perform its task is called locale-sensitive and uses the Locale to tailor information for the user. For example, displaying a number is a locale-sensitive operation—​the number should be formatted according to the customs/conventions of the user’s native country, region, or culture.

A Locale is made up of a language code and a country code. For example "en_US" is the code for US English, whilst "en_GB" is the code for British English.

16.1 Understanding Message Bundles

Now that you have an idea of locales, to use them in Grails you create message bundle file containing the different languages that you wish to render. Message bundles in Grails are located inside the grails-app/i18n directory and are simple Java properties files.

Each bundle starts with the name messages by convention and ends with the locale. Grails ships with several message bundles for a whole range of languages within the grails-app/i18n directory. For example:

  • messages.properties

  • messages_da.properties

  • messages_de.properties

  • messages_es.properties

  • messages_fr.properties

  • …​

By default Grails looks in messages.properties for messages unless the user has specified a locale. You can create your own message bundle by simply creating a new properties file that ends with the locale you are interested in. For example messages_en_GB.properties for British English.

16.2 Changing Locales

By default, the user locale is detected from the incoming Accept-Language header. You can provide users the capability to switch locales by simply passing a parameter called lang to Grails as a request parameter:

/book/list?lang=es

Grails will automatically switch the user’s locale and subsequent requests will use the switched locale.

By default, Grails uses SessionLocaleResolver as the localeResolver bean.

You can change the default locale easily:

grails-app/conf/spring/resources.groovy
import org.springframework.web.servlet.i18n.SessionLocaleResolver

beans = {
    localeResolver(SessionLocaleResolver) {
        defaultLocale= new Locale('es')
    }
}

Other localeResolver are available. For example, you could use save the switched locale in a Cookie:

grails-app/conf/spring/resources.groovy
import org.springframework.web.servlet.i18n.CookieLocaleResolver

beans = {
    localeResolver(CookieLocaleResolver) {
        defaultLocale= new Locale('es')
    }
}

Or fix the locale:

grails-app/conf/spring/resources.groovy
import org.springframework.web.servlet.i18n.FixedLocaleResolver

beans = {
    localeResolver(FixedLocaleResolver, new Locale('de'))
}

16.3 Reading Messages

Reading Messages in the View

The most common place that you need messages is inside the view. Use the message tag for this:

<g:message code="my.localized.content" />

As long as you have a key in your messages.properties (with appropriate locale suffix) such as the one below then Grails will look up the message:

my.localized.content=Hola, me llamo John. Hoy es domingo.

Messages can also include arguments, for example:

<g:message code="my.localized.content" args="${ ['Juan', 'lunes'] }" />

The message declaration specifies positional parameters which are dynamically specified:

my.localized.content=Hola, me llamo {0}. Hoy es {1}.

Reading Messages in Grails Artifacts with MessageSource

In a Grails artifact, you can inject messageSource and use the method getMessage with the arguments: message code, message arguments, default message and locale to retrieve a message.

import org.springframework.context.MessageSource
import org.springframework.context.i18n.LocaleContextHolder

class MyappController {

    MessageSource messageSource

    def show() {
        def msg = messageSource.getMessage('my.localized.content', ['Juan', 'lunes'] as Object[], 'Default Message', LocaleContextHolder.locale)
    }

Reading Messages in Controllers and Tag Libraries with the Message Tag

Additionally, you can read a message inside Controllers and Tag Libraries with the Message Tag. However, using the message tag relies on GSP support which a Grails application may not necessarily have; e.g. a rest application.

In a controller, you can invoke tags as methods.

def show() {
    def msg = message(code: "my.localized.content", args: ['Juan', 'lunes'])
}

The same technique can be used in tag libraries, but if your tag library uses a custom namespace then you must prefix the call with g.:

def myTag = { attrs, body ->
    def msg = g.message(code: "my.localized.content", args: ['Juan', 'lunes'])
}

16.4 Scaffolding and i18n

Grails scaffolding templates for controllers and views are fully i18n-aware. The GSPs use the message tag for labels, buttons etc. and controller flash messages use i18n to resolve locale-specific messages.

The scaffolding includes locale specific labels for domain classes and domain fields. For example, if you have a Book domain class with a title field:

class Book {
    String title
}

The scaffolding will use labels with the following keys:

book.label = Libro
book.title.label = Título del libro

You can use this property pattern if you’d like or come up with one of your own. There is nothing special about the use of the word label as part of the key other than it’s the convention used by the scaffolding.

17 Security

Grails is no more or less secure than Java Servlets. However, Java servlets (and hence Grails) are extremely secure and largely immune to common buffer overrun and malformed URL exploits due to the nature of the Java Virtual Machine underpinning the code.

Web security problems typically occur due to developer naivety or mistakes, and there is a little Grails can do to avoid common mistakes and make writing secure applications easier to write.

What Grails Automatically Does

Grails has a few built in safety mechanisms by default.

  • All standard database access via GORM domain objects is automatically SQL escaped to prevent SQL injection attacks

  • The default scaffolding templates HTML escape all data fields when displayed

  • Grails link creating tags (link, form, createLink, createLinkTo and others) all use appropriate escaping mechanisms to prevent code injection

  • Grails provides codecs to let you trivially escape data when rendered as HTML, JavaScript and URLs to prevent injection attacks here.

17.1 Securing Against Attacks

SQL injection

Hibernate, which is the technology underlying GORM domain classes, automatically escapes data when committing to database so this is not an issue. However it is still possible to write bad dynamic HQL code that uses unchecked request parameters. For example doing the following is vulnerable to HQL injection attacks:

def vulnerable() {
    def books = Book.find("from Book as b where b.title ='" + params.title + "'")
}

or the analogous call using a GString:

def vulnerable() {
    def books = Book.find("from Book as b where b.title ='${params.title}'")
}

Do not do this. Use named or positional parameters instead to pass in parameters:

def safe() {
    def books = Book.find("from Book as b where b.title = ?",
                          [params.title])
}

or

def safe() {
    def books = Book.find("from Book as b where b.title = :title",
                          [title: params.title])
}

Phishing

This really a public relations issue in terms of avoiding hijacking of your branding and a declared communication policy with your customers. Customers need to know how to identify valid emails.

XSS - cross-site scripting injection

It is important that your application verifies as much as possible that incoming requests were originated from your application and not from another site. It is also important to ensure that all data values rendered into views are escaped correctly. For example when rendering to HTML or XHTML you must ensure that people cannot maliciously inject JavaScript or other HTML into data or tags viewed by others.

Grails 2.3 and above include special support for automatically encoded data placed into GSP pages. See the documentation on Cross Site Scripting (XSS) prevention for further information.

You must also avoid the use of request parameters or data fields for determining the next URL to redirect the user to. If you use a successURL parameter for example to determine where to redirect a user to after a successful login, attackers can imitate your login procedure using your own site, and then redirect the user back to their own site once logged in, potentially allowing JavaScript code to then exploit the logged-in account on the site.

Cross-site request forgery

CSRF involves unauthorized commands being transmitted from a user that a website trusts. A typical example would be another website embedding a link to perform an action on your website if the user is still authenticated.

The best way to decrease risk against these types of attacks is to use the useToken attribute on your forms. See Handling Duplicate Form Submissions for more information on how to use it. An additional measure would be to not use remember-me cookies.

HTML/URL injection

This is where bad data is supplied such that when it is later used to create a link in a page, clicking it will not cause the expected behaviour, and may redirect to another site or alter request parameters.

HTML/URL injection is easily handled with the codecs supplied by Grails, and the tag libraries supplied by Grails all use encodeAsURL where appropriate. If you create your own tags that generate URLs you will need to be mindful of doing this too.

Denial of service

Load balancers and other appliances are more likely to be useful here, but there are also issues relating to excessive queries for example where a link is created by an attacker to set the maximum value of a result set so that a query could exceed the memory limits of the server or slow the system down. The solution here is to always sanitize request parameters before passing them to dynamic finders or other GORM query methods:

int limit = 100
def safeMax = Math.min(params.max?.toInteger() ?: limit, limit) // limit to 100 results
return Book.list(max:safeMax)

Guessable IDs

Many applications use the last part of the URL as an "id" of some object to retrieve from GORM or elsewhere. Especially in the case of GORM these are easily guessable as they are typically sequential integers.

Therefore you must assert that the requesting user is allowed to view the object with the requested id before returning the response to the user.

Not doing this is "security through obscurity" which is inevitably breached, just like having a default password of "letmein" and so on.

You must assume that every unprotected URL is publicly accessible one way or another.

17.2 Cross Site Scripting (XSS) Prevention

Cross Site Scripting (XSS) attacks are a common attack vector for web applications. They typically involve submitting HTML or Javascript code in a form such that when that code is displayed, the browser does something nasty. It could be as simple as popping up an alert box, or it could be much worse like for example one could access other users session cookies.

The solution is to escape all untrusted user input when it is displayed in a page. For example,

<script>alert('Got ya!');</script>

will become

&lt;script&gt;alert('Got ya!');&lt;/script&gt;

when rendered, nullifying the effects of the malicious input.

By default, Grails plays it safe and escapes all content in ${} expressions in GSPs. All the standard GSP tags are also safe by default, escaping any relevant attribute values.

So what happens when you want to stop Grails from escaping some content? There are valid use cases for putting HTML into the database and rendering it as-is, as long as that content is trusted. In such cases, you can tell Grails that the content is safe as should be rendered raw, i.e. without any escaping:

<section>${raw(page.content)}</section>

The raw() method you see here is available from controllers, tag libraries and GSP pages.

XSS prevention is hard and requires a lot of developer attention

Although Grails plays it safe by default, that is no guarantee that your application will be invulnerable to an XSS-style attack. Such an attack is less likely to succeed than would otherwise be the case, but developers should always be conscious of potential attack vectors and attempt to uncover vulnerabilities in the application during testing. It’s also easy to switch to an unsafe default, thereby increasing the risk of a vulnerability being introduced.

There are more details about the XSS in OWASP - XSS prevention rules and OWASP - Types of Cross-Site Scripting. Types of XSS are: Stored XSS, Reflected XSS and DOM based XSS. DOM based XSS prevention is coming more important because of the popularity of Javascript client side templating and Single Page Apps.

Grails codecs are mainly for preventing stored and reflected XSS type of attacks. Grails 2.4 includes HTMLJS codec that assists in preventing some DOM based XSS attacks.

It’s difficult to make a solution that works for everyone, and so Grails provides a lot of flexibility with regard to fine-tuning how escaping works, allowing you to keep most of your application safe while switching off default escaping or changing the codec used for pages, tags, page fragments, and more.

Configuration

It is recommended that you review the configuration of a newly created Grails application to garner an understanding of XSS prevention works in Grails.

When you tag a cookie with the HttpOnly flag, it tells the browser that this particular cookie should only be accessed by the server. Any attempt to access the cookie from client script is strictly forbidden. This can be configured in the application.yml configuration file as seen below:

server:
    session:
        cookie:
            domain: example.org
            http-only: true
            path: /
            secure: true

GSP features the ability to automatically HTML encode GSP expressions, and as of Grails 2.3 this is the default configuration. The default configuration (found in application.yml) for a newly created Grails application can be seen below:

grails:
    views:
        gsp:
            encoding: UTF-8
            htmlcodec: xml # use xml escaping instead of HTML4 escaping
            codecs:
                expression: html # escapes values inside ${}
                scriptlets: html # escapes output from scriptlets in GSPs
                taglib: none # escapes output from taglibs
                staticparts: none # escapes output from static template parts

GSP features several codecs that it uses when writing the page to the response. The codecs are configured in the codecs block and are described below:

  • expression - The expression codec is used to encode any code found within ${..} expressions. The default for newly created application is html encoding.

  • scriptlet - Used for output from GSP scriplets (<% %>, <%= %> blocks). The default for newly created applications is html encoding

  • taglib - Used to encode output from GSP tag libraries. The default is none for new applications, as typically it is the responsibility of the tag author to define the encoding of a given tag and by specifying none Grails remains backwards compatible with older tag libraries.

  • staticparts - Used to encode the raw markup output by a GSP page. The default is none.

Double Encoding Prevention

Versions of Grails prior to 2.3, included the ability to set the default codec to html, however enabling this setting sometimes proved problematic when using existing plugins due to encoding being applied twice (once by the html codec and then again if the plugin manually called encodeAsHTML).

Grails 2.3 includes double encoding prevention so that when an expression is evaluated, it will not encode if the data has already been encoded (Example ${foo.encodeAsHTML()}).

Raw Output

If you are 100% sure that the value you wish to present on the page has not been received from user input, and you do not wish the value to be encoded then you can use the raw method:

${raw(book.title)}

The 'raw' method is available in tag libraries, controllers and GSP pages.

Per Plugin Encoding

Grails also features the ability to control the codecs used on a per plugin basis. For example if you have a plugin named foo installed, then placing the following configuration in your application.groovy will disable encoding for only the foo plugin

foo.grails.views.gsp.codecs.expression = "none"

Per Page Encoding

You can also control the various codecs used to render a GSP page on a per page basis, using a page directive:

<%@page expressionCodec="none" %>

Per Tag Library Encoding

Each tag library created has the opportunity to specify a default codec used to encode output from the tag library using the "defaultEncodeAs" property:

static defaultEncodeAs = 'html'

Encoding can also be specified on a per tag basis using "encodeAsForTags":

static encodeAsForTags = [tagName: 'raw']

Context Sensitive Encoding Switching

Certain tags require certain encodings and Grails features the ability to enable a codec only a certain part of a tag’s execution using the "withCodec" method. Consider for example the "<g:javascript>"" tag which allows you to embed JavaScript code in the page. This tag requires JavaScript encoding, not HTML coding for the execution of the body of the tag (but not for the markup that is output):

out.println '<script type="text/javascript">'
    withCodec("JavaScript") {
        out << body()
    }
    out.println()
    out.println '</script>'

Forced Encoding for Tags

If a tag specifies a default encoding that differs from your requirements you can force the encoding for any tag by passing the optional 'encodeAs' attribute:

<g:message code="foo.bar" encodeAs="JavaScript" />

Default Encoding for All Output

The default configuration for new applications is fine for most use cases, and backwards compatible with existing plugins and tag libraries. However, you can also make your application even more secure by configuring Grails to always encode all output at the end of a response. This is done using the filteringCodecForContentType configuration in application.groovy:

grails.views.gsp.filteringCodecForContentType.'text/html' = 'html'

Note that, if activated, the staticparts codec typically needs to be set to raw so that static markup is not encoded:

codecs {
        expression = 'html' // escapes values inside ${}
        scriptlet = 'html' // escapes output from scriptlets in GSPs
        taglib = 'none' // escapes output from taglibs
        staticparts = 'raw' // escapes output from static template parts
    }

17.3 Encoding and Decoding Objects

Grails supports the concept of dynamic encode/decode methods. A set of standard codecs are bundled with Grails. Grails also supports a simple mechanism for developers to contribute their own codecs that will be recognized at runtime.

Codec Classes

A Grails codec class is one that may contain an encode closure, a decode closure or both. When a Grails application starts up the Grails framework dynamically loads codecs from the grails-app/utils/ directory.

The framework looks under grails-app/utils/ for class names that end with the convention Codec. For example one of the standard codecs that ships with Grails is HTMLCodec.

If a codec contains an encode closure Grails will create a dynamic encode method and add that method to the Object class with a name representing the codec that defined the encode closure. For example, the HTMLCodec class defines an encode closure, so Grails attaches it with the name encodeAsHTML.

The HTMLCodec and URLCodec classes also define a decode closure, so Grails attaches those with the names decodeHTML and decodeURL respectively. Dynamic codec methods may be invoked from anywhere in a Grails application. For example, consider a case where a report contains a property called 'description' which may contain special characters that must be escaped to be presented in an HTML document. One way to deal with that in a GSP is to encode the description property using the dynamic encode method as shown below:

${report.description.encodeAsHTML()}

Decoding is performed using value.decodeHTML() syntax.

Encoder and Decoder interfaces for staticly compiled code

A preferred way to use codecs is to use the codecLookup bean to get hold of Encoder and Decoder instances .

package org.grails.encoder;

public interface CodecLookup {
    public Encoder lookupEncoder(String codecName);
    public Decoder lookupDecoder(String codecName);
}

example of using CodecLookup and Encoder interface

import org.grails.encoder.CodecLookup

class CustomTagLib {
    CodecLookup codecLookup

    def myTag = { Map attrs, body ->
        out << codecLookup.lookupEncoder('HTML').encode(attrs.something)
    }
}

Standard Codecs

HTMLCodec

This codec performs HTML escaping and unescaping, so that values can be rendered safely in an HTML page without creating any HTML tags or damaging the page layout. For example, given a value "Don’t you know that 2 > 1?" you wouldn’t be able to show this safely within an HTML page because the > will look like it closes a tag, which is especially bad if you render this data within an attribute, such as the value attribute of an input field.

Example of usage:

<input name="comment.message" value="${comment.message.encodeAsHTML()}"/>
Note that the HTML encoding does not re-encode apostrophe/single quote so you must use double quotes on attribute values to avoid text with apostrophes affecting your page.

HTMLCodec defaults to HTML4 style escaping (legacy HTMLCodec implementation in Grails versions before 2.3.0) which escapes non-ascii characters.

You can use plain XML escaping instead of HTML4 escaping by setting this config property in application.groovy:

grails.views.gsp.htmlcodec = 'xml'

XMLCodec

This codec performs XML escaping and unescaping. It escapes & , < , > , " , ' , \\\\ , @ , ` , non breaking space (\\\\u00a0), line separator (\\\\u2028) and paragraph separator (\\\\u2029).

HTMLJSCodec

This codec performs HTML and JS encoding. It is used for preventing some DOM-XSS vulnerabilities. See OWASP - DOM based XSS Prevention Cheat Sheet for guidelines of preventing DOM based XSS attacks.

URLCodec

URL encoding is required when creating URLs in links or form actions, or any time data is used to create a URL. It prevents illegal characters from getting into the URL and changing its meaning, for example "Apple & Blackberry" is not going to work well as a parameter in a GET request as the ampersand will break parameter parsing.

Example of usage:

<a href="/mycontroller/find?searchKey=${lastSearch.encodeAsURL()}">
Repeat last search
</a>

Base64Codec

Performs Base64 encode/decode functions. Example of usage:

Your registration code is: ${user.registrationCode.encodeAsBase64()}

JavaScriptCodec

Escapes Strings so they can be used as valid JavaScript strings. For example:

Element.update('${elementId}',
    '${render(template: "/common/message").encodeAsJavaScript()}')

HexCodec

Encodes byte arrays or lists of integers to lowercase hexadecimal strings, and can decode hexadecimal strings into byte arrays. For example:

Selected colour: #${[255,127,255].encodeAsHex()}

MD5Codec

Uses the MD5 algorithm to digest byte arrays or lists of integers, or the bytes of a string (in default system encoding), as a lowercase hexadecimal string. Example of usage:

Your API Key: ${user.uniqueID.encodeAsMD5()}

MD5BytesCodec

Uses the MD5 algorithm to digest byte arrays or lists of integers, or the bytes of a string (in default system encoding), as a byte array. Example of usage:

byte[] passwordHash = params.password.encodeAsMD5Bytes()

SHA1Codec

Uses the SHA1 algorithm to digest byte arrays or lists of integers, or the bytes of a string (in default system encoding), as a lowercase hexadecimal string. Example of usage:

Your API Key: ${user.uniqueID.encodeAsSHA1()}

SHA1BytesCodec

Uses the SHA1 algorithm to digest byte arrays or lists of integers, or the bytes of a string (in default system encoding), as a byte array. Example of usage:

byte[] passwordHash = params.password.encodeAsSHA1Bytes()

SHA256Codec

Uses the SHA256 algorithm to digest byte arrays or lists of integers, or the bytes of a string (in default system encoding), as a lowercase hexadecimal string. Example of usage:

Your API Key: ${user.uniqueID.encodeAsSHA256()}

SHA256BytesCodec

Uses the SHA256 algorithm to digest byte arrays or lists of integers, or the bytes of a string (in default system encoding), as a byte array. Example of usage:

byte[] passwordHash = params.password.encodeAsSHA256Bytes()

Custom Codecs

Applications may define their own codecs and Grails will load them along with the standard codecs. A custom codec class must be defined in the grails-app/utils/ directory and the class name must end with Codec. The codec may contain a static encode closure, a static decode closure or both. The closure must accept a single argument which will be the object that the dynamic method was invoked on. For Example:

class PigLatinCodec {
  static encode = { str ->
    // convert the string to pig latin and return the result
  }
}

With the above codec in place an application could do something like this:

${lastName.encodeAsPigLatin()}

17.4 Authentication

Grails has no default mechanism for authentication as it is possible to implement authentication in many different ways. It is however, easy to implement a simple authentication mechanism using interceptors. This is sufficient for simple use cases but it’s highly preferable to use an established security framework, for example by using the Spring Security or the Shiro plugin.

Interceptors let you apply authentication across all controllers or across a URI space. For example you can create a new set of filters in a class called grails-app/controllers/SecurityInterceptor.groovy by running:

grails create-interceptor security

and implement your interception logic there:

class SecurityInterceptor {

    SecurityInterceptor() {
        matchAll()
        .except(controller:'user', action:'login')
    }

    boolean before() {
        if (!session.user && actionName != "login") {
            redirect(controller: "user", action: "login")
            return false
        }
        return true
    }

}

Here the interceptor intercepts execution before all actions except login are executed, and if there is no user in the session then redirect to the login action.

The login action itself is simple too:

def login() {
    if (request.get) {
        return // render the login view
    }

    def u = User.findByLogin(params.login)
    if (u) {
        if (u.password == params.password) {
            session.user = u
            redirect(action: "home")
        }
        else {
            render(view: "login", model: [message: "Password incorrect"])
        }
    }
    else {
        render(view: "login", model: [message: "User not found"])
    }
}

17.5 Security Plugins

If you need more advanced functionality beyond simple authentication such as authorization, roles etc. then you should consider using the spring security core plugin.

17.5.1 Spring Security

The Spring Security plugins are built on the Spring Security project which provides a flexible, extensible framework for building all sorts of authentication and authorization schemes. The plugins are modular so you can install just the functionality that you need for your application. The Spring Security plugins are the official security plugins for Grails and are actively maintained and supported.

There is a Spring Security Core plugin which supports form-based authentication, encrypted/salted passwords, HTTP Basic authentication, etc. and secondary dependent plugins provide alternate functionality such as ACL support, single sign-on with Jasig CAS, LDAP authentication, Kerberos authentication, and a plugin providing user interface extensions and security workflows.

See the Spring Security Core plugin page for basic information and user guide for detailed information.

18 Plugins

Grails is first and foremost a web application framework, but it is also a platform. By exposing a number of extension points that let you extend anything from the command line interface to the runtime configuration engine, Grails can be customised to suit almost any needs. To hook into this platform, all you need to do is create a plugin.

Extending the platform may sound complicated, but plugins can range from trivially simple to incredibly powerful. If you know how to build a Grails application, you’ll know how to create a plugin for sharing a data model or some static resources.

18.1 Creating and Installing Plugins

Creating Plugins

Creating a Grails plugin is a simple matter of running the command:

grails create-plugin <<PLUGIN NAME>>

This will create a web-plugin project for the name you specify. For example running grails create-plugin example would create a new web-plugin project called example.

In Grails 3.0 you should consider whether the plugin you create requires a web environment or whether the plugin can be used with other profiles. If your plugin does not require a web environment then use the "plugin" profile instead of the default "web-plugin" profile:

grails create-plugin <<PLUGIN NAME>> --profile=plugin

Make sure the plugin name does not contain more than one capital letter in a row, or it won’t work. Camel case is fine, though.

Being a regular Grails project has a number of benefits in that you can immediately test your plugin by running (if the plugin targets the "web" profile):

grails run-app
Plugin projects don’t provide an index.gsp by default since most plugins don’t need it. So, if you try to view the plugin running in a browser right after creating it, you will receive a page not found error. You can easily create a grails-app/views/index.gsp for your plugin if you’d like.

The structure of a Grails plugin is very nearly the same as a Grails application project’s except that in the src/main/groovy directory under the plugin package structure you will find a plugin descriptor class (a class that ends in "GrailsPlugin"). For example:

import grails.plugins.*

class ExampleGrailsPlugin extends Plugin {
   ...
}

All plugins must have this class under the src/main/groovy directory, otherwise they are not regarded as a plugin. The plugin class defines metadata about the plugin, and optionally various hooks into plugin extension points (covered shortly).

You can also provide additional information about your plugin using several special properties:

  • title - short one-sentence description of your plugin

  • grailsVersion - The version range of Grails that the plugin supports. eg. "1.2 > *" (indicating 1.2 or higher)

  • author - plugin author’s name

  • authorEmail - plugin author’s contact e-mail

  • developers - Any additional developers beyond the author specified above.

  • description - full multi-line description of plugin’s features

  • documentation - URL of the plugin’s documentation

  • license - License of the plugin

  • issueManagement - Issue Tracker of the plugin

  • scm - Source code management location of the plugin

Here is a slimmed down example from the Quartz Grails plugin:

package quartz

@Slf4j
class QuartzGrailsPlugin extends Plugin {
    // the version or versions of Grails the plugin is designed for
    def grailsVersion = "3.0.0.BUILD-SNAPSHOT > *"
    // resources that are excluded from plugin packaging
    def pluginExcludes = [
            "grails-app/views/error.gsp"
    ]
    def title = "Quartz" // Headline display name of the plugin
    def author = "Jeff Brown"
    def authorEmail = "[email protected]"
    def description = '''\
Adds Quartz job scheduling features
'''
    def profiles = ['web']
    List loadAfter = ['hibernate3', 'hibernate4', 'hibernate5', 'services']
    def documentation = "http://grails.org/plugin/quartz"
    def license = "APACHE"
    def issueManagement = [ system: "Github Issues", url: "http://github.com/grails3-plugins/quartz/issues" ]
    def developers = [
            [ name: "Joe Dev", email: "[email protected]" ]
    ]
    def scm = [ url: "https://github.com/grails3-plugins/quartz/" ]

    Closure doWithSpring()......

Plugin Configuration

Instead of directly accessing Grails configuration as grailsApplication.config.mail.hostName, use a Spring Boot configuration bean (or a POJO) annotated with ConfigurationProperties annotation. Here is an example plugin configuration:

./src/main/groovy/example/MailPluginConfiguration.groovy

package example

import org.springframework.boot.context.properties.ConfigurationProperties

@ConfigurationProperties(prefix = "mail")
class MailPluginConfiguration {

    String hostName
    int port
    String from
}

You can inject the MailPluginConfiguration bean into your bean like any other bean.

./grails-app/services/example/MailService.groovy

package example

class MailService {

    MainPluginConfiguration mailPluginConfiguration

    void sendMail() {

    }

}

Please read the Spring Boot Externalized Configuration section for more information.

Installing Local Plugins

In order to install the Grails plugin to your local Maven, you could use Gradle Maven Publish plugin. You may also need to configure the publishing extension as:

publishing {
    publications {
        maven(MavenPublication) {
            versionMapping {
                usage('java-api') {
                    fromResolutionOf('runtimeClasspath')
                }
                usage('java-runtime') {
                    fromResolutionResult()
                }
            }
            from components.java
        }
    }
}
Please refer to the Gradle Maven Publish plugin documentation for up-to-date information.

To make your plugin available for use in a Grails application run the ./gradlew publishToMavenLocal command:

./gradlew publishToMavenLocal

This will install the plugin into your local Maven cache. Then to use the plugin within an application declare a dependency on the plugin in your build.gradle file and include mavenLocal() in your repositories hash:

...
repositories {
    ...
    mavenLocal()
}
...
implementation "org.grails.plugins:quartz:0.1"
In Grails 2.x plugins were packaged as ZIP files, however in Grails 3.x plugins are simple JAR files that can be added to the classpath of the IDE.

Plugins and Multi-Project Builds

If you wish to setup a plugin as part of a multi project build then follow these steps.

Step 1: Create the application and the plugin

Using the grails command create an application and a plugin:

$ grails create-app myapp
$ grails create-plugin myplugin

Step 2: Create a settings.gradle file

In the same directory create a settings.gradle file with the following contents:

include "myapp", "myplugin"

The directory structure should be as follows:

PROJECT_DIR
  - settings.gradle
  - myapp
    - build.gradle
  - myplugin
    - build.gradle

Step 3: Declare a project dependency on the plugin

Within the build.gradle of the application declare a dependency on the plugin within the plugins block:

grails {
    plugins {
        implementation project(':myplugin')
    }
}
You can also declare the dependency within the dependencies block, however you will not get subproject reloading if you do this!

Step 4: Configure the plugin to enable reloading

In the plugin directory, add or modify the gradle.properties file. A new property exploded=true needs to be set in order for the plugin to add the exploded directories to the classpath.

Step 5: Run the application

Now run the application using the grails run-app command from the root of the application directory, you can use the verbose flag to see the Gradle output:

$ cd myapp
$ grails run-app -verbose

You will notice from the Gradle output that plugins sources are built and placed on the classpath of your application:

:myplugin:compileAstJava UP-TO-DATE
:myplugin:compileAstGroovy UP-TO-DATE
:myplugin:processAstResources UP-TO-DATE
:myplugin:astClasses UP-TO-DATE
:myplugin:compileJava UP-TO-DATE
:myplugin:configScript UP-TO-DATE
:myplugin:compileGroovy
:myplugin:copyAssets UP-TO-DATE
:myplugin:copyCommands UP-TO-DATE
:myplugin:copyTemplates UP-TO-DATE
:myplugin:processResources
:myapp:compileJava UP-TO-DATE
:myapp:compileGroovy
:myapp:processResources UP-TO-DATE
:myapp:classes
:myapp:findMainClass
:myapp:bootRun
Grails application running at http://localhost:8080 in environment: development

Notes on excluded Artefacts

Although the create-plugin command creates certain files for you so that the plugin can be run as a Grails application, not all of these files are included when packaging a plugin. The following is a list of artefacts created, but not included by package-plugin:

  • grails-app/build.gradle (although it is used to generate dependencies.groovy)

  • grails-app/conf/application.yml (renamed to plugin.yml)

  • grails-app/conf/spring/resources.groovy

  • grails-app/conf/logback.groovy

  • Everything within /src/test/*\*

  • SCM management files within *\*/.svn/*\* and *\*/CVS/*\*

Customizing the plugin contents

When developing a plugin you may create test classes and sources that are used during the development and testing of the plugin but should not be exported to the application.

To exclude test sources you need to modify the pluginExcludes property of the plugin descriptor AND exclude the resources inside your build.gradle file. For example say you have some classes under the com.demo package that are in your plugin source tree but should not be packaged in the application. In your plugin descriptor you should exclude these:

// resources that should be loaded by the plugin once installed in the application
  def pluginExcludes = [
    '**/com/demo/**'
  ]

And in your build.gradle you should exclude the compiled classes from the JAR file:

jar {
  exclude "com/demo/**/**"
}

Inline Plugins in Grails 3.0

In Grails 2.x it was possible to specify inline plugins in BuildConfig, in Grails 3.x this functionality has been replaced by Gradle’s multi-project build feature.

To set up a multi project build create an appliation and a plugin in a parent directory:

$ grails create-app myapp
$ grails create-plugin myplugin

Then create a settings.gradle file in the parent directory specifying the location of your application and plugin:

include 'myapp', 'myplugin'

Finally add a dependency in your application’s build.gradle on the plugin:

implementation project(':myplugin')

Using this technique you have achieved the equivalent of inline plugins from Grails 2.x.

18.2 Plugin Repositories

Distributing Plugins in the Grails Central Plugin Repository

The preferred way to distribute plugin is to publish to the official Grails Central Plugin Repository. This will make your plugin visible to the list-plugins command:

grails list-plugins

which lists all plugins that are in the central repository. Your plugin will also be available to the plugin-info command:

grails plugin-info [plugin-name]

which prints extra information about it, such as its description, who wrote, etc.

If you have created a Grails plugin and want it to be hosted in the central repository, you’ll find instructions for getting an account on the plugin portal website.

18.3 Providing Basic Artefacts

Add Command Line Commands

A plugin can add new commands to the Grails 3.0 interactive shell in one of two ways. First, using the create-script you can create a code generation script which will become available to the application. The create-script command will create the script in the src/main/scripts directory:

+ src/main/scripts     <-- additional scripts here
 + grails-app
      + controllers
      + services
      + etc.

Code generation scripts can be used to create artefacts within the project tree and automate interactions with Gradle.

If you want to create a new shell command that interacts with a loaded Grails application instance then you should use the create-command command:

$ grails create-command MyExampleCommand

This will create a file called grails-app/commands/PACKAGE_PATH/MyExampleCommand.groovy that extends ApplicationCommand:

import grails.dev.commands.*

class MyExampleCommand implements ApplicationCommand {

  boolean handle(ExecutionContext ctx) {
      println "Hello World"
      return true
  }
}

An ApplicationCommand has access to the GrailsApplication instance and is subject to autowiring like any other Spring bean.

You can also inform Grails to skip the execution of Bootstrap.groovy files with a simple property in your command:

class MyExampleCommand implements ApplicationCommand {

  boolean skipBootstrap = true

  boolean handle(ExecutionContext ctx) {
      ...
  }
}

For each ApplicationCommand present Grails will create a shell command and a Gradle task to invoke the ApplicationCommand. In the above example you can invoke the MyExampleCommand class using either:

$ grails my-example

Or

$ gradle myExample

The Grails version is all lower case hyphen separated and excludes the "Command" suffix.

The main difference between code generation scripts and ApplicationCommand instances is that the latter has full access to the Grails application state and hence can be used to perform tasks that interactive with the database, call into GORM etc.

In Grails 2.x Gant scripts could be used to perform both these tasks, in Grails 3.x code generation and interacting with runtime application state has been cleanly separated.

Adding a new grails-app artifact (Controller, Tag Library, Service, etc.)

A plugin can add new artifacts by creating the relevant file within the grails-app tree.

+ grails-app
      + controllers  <-- additional controllers here
      + services <-- additional services here
      + etc.  <-- additional XXX here

Providing Views, Templates and View resolution

When a plugin provides a controller it may also provide default views to be rendered. This is an excellent way to modularize your application through plugins. Grails' view resolution mechanism will first look for the view in the application it is installed into and if that fails will attempt to look for the view within the plugin. This means that you can override views provided by a plugin by creating corresponding GSPs in the application’s grails-app/views directory.

For example, consider a controller called BookController that’s provided by an 'amazon' plugin. If the action being executed is list, Grails will first look for a view called grails-app/views/book/list.gsp then if that fails it will look for the same view relative to the plugin.

However if the view uses templates that are also provided by the plugin then the following syntax may be necessary:

<g:render template="fooTemplate" plugin="amazon"/>

Note the usage of the plugin attribute, which contains the name of the plugin where the template resides. If this is not specified then Grails will look for the template relative to the application.

Excluded Artefacts

By default Grails excludes the following files during the packaging process:

  • grails-app/conf/logback.groovy

  • grails-app/conf/application.yml (renamed to plugin.yml)

  • grails-app/conf/spring/resources.groovy

  • Everything within /src/test/*\*

  • SCM management files within *\*/.svn/*\* and *\*/CVS/*\*

The default UrlMappings.groovy file is not excluded, so remove any mappings that are not required for the plugin to work. You are also free to add a UrlMappings definition under a different name which will be included. For example a file called grails-app/controllers/BlogUrlMappings.groovy is fine.

The list of excludes is extensible with the pluginExcludes property:

// resources that are excluded from plugin packaging
def pluginExcludes = [
    "grails-app/views/error.gsp"
]

This is useful for example to include demo or test resources in the plugin repository, but not include them in the final distribution.

18.4 Evaluating Conventions

Before looking at providing runtime configuration based on conventions you first need to understand how to evaluate those conventions from a plugin. Every plugin has an implicit application variable which is an instance of the GrailsApplication interface.

The GrailsApplication interface provides methods to evaluate the conventions within the project and internally stores references to all artifact classes within your application.

Artifacts implement the GrailsClass interface, which represents a Grails resource such as a controller or a tag library. For example to get all GrailsClass instances you can do:

for (grailsClass in application.allClasses) {
    println grailsClass.name
}

GrailsApplication has a few "magic" properties to narrow the type of artefact you are interested in. For example to access controllers you can use:

for (controllerClass in application.controllerClasses) {
    println controllerClass.name
}

The dynamic method conventions are as follows:

  • *Classes - Retrieves all the classes for a particular artefact name. For example application.controllerClasses.

  • get*Class - Retrieves a named class for a particular artefact. For example application.getControllerClass("PersonController")

  • is*Class - Returns true if the given class is of the given artefact type. For example application.isControllerClass(PersonController)

The GrailsClass interface has a number of useful methods that let you further evaluate and work with the conventions. These include:

  • getPropertyValue - Gets the initial value of the given property on the class

  • hasProperty - Returns true if the class has the specified property

  • newInstance - Creates a new instance of this class.

  • getName - Returns the logical name of the class in the application without the trailing convention part if applicable

  • getShortName - Returns t